I’ve just spent a weekend installing and reinstalling my parents PCs. My father purchased a new Dell machine (despite my pleas for him to try a Mac) with Vista Home Premium. Now, before you call this a Vista-bashing post I’d like to say that I’m actually quite fond of many aspects of Vista. So no, it’s not about Windows.

It is, however, about the use of cloud computing in everyday things. Until now my parents have been using Outlook to check their email, which means mail and contacts goes bye-bye, if the machine crashes.

Bookmarks within a browser haven’t really been around, and have existed only as shortcuts on the desktop.

And finally no real backup system has been implemented, which until now thankfully hasn’t come back to haunt us.
So what’s changed since I installed XP for them last time? Well, for starters they have a 10 / 10 fiber connection (soon to be 20 / 20, to my undying envy), so upload speed isn’t an issue. Secondly cloud computing aspects have never been more prominent – if still only in the small things.

Foxmarks
I succeeded in switching my father to Firefox, when IE simply stopped working properly. And he seemed to like it. He doesn’t use tabs and he doesn’t use plugins, but he now has a laptop as well. Which means Foxmarks is a very good idea. Foxmarks basically syncs your Firefox bookmarks with different computers, as well as backing them up to the cloud (online storage). When I installed Foxmarks on his old machine, his new one and then the laptop, his bookmarks appeared on all of them. And will continue to appear, whenever changes are made to any of the machines – he was pleased. Useful!

Gmail
Now I’ve not succeeded in making him switch to an online email account, but I created a Gmail address for him. Most people know Gmail now but not everyone knows that it can pick up you POP3 mail as well. So now his old-school POP3 mail is sent to Gmail and is always online, he can check it anywhere. And contacts won’t be lost if the machine crashes.

Live Mesh
Microsoft has seen a shift in focus over the last few years and is now a far more open company than previously. One of the benefits of this is a more platform neutral view on things, and Live Mesh is a brilliant example of free, innovative and very useful software, which will work on both your Windows and Mac-systems. Basically you have you own online “Mesh” network, which your computers are hooked up to, via a small service than runs in the background of your operating system. Once you add the machine to your Mesh, you can choose folders to sync to the it. This way they are always backed up to the cloud. Officially you have 5GB at the moment (the service is in beta), but people are reporting using far more than that. Besides, it is mostly designed for your most important documents. Now, the really cool thing for professionals with more than one machine, is the syncing to others computers. Once you sync a folder to the cloud from one machine, you can sync this folder to another computer – and work from it. In other words you will have the same documents on all you computers, Mac or Windows, and it really works well. I’ve become quite dependent on it.

The Future
Google is said to be working on Webdrive / G-drive / Platypus, the name is unknown, but it is said to be something reminiscent of Mesh. Only with no storage limit. It’s no secret that Google wants to run your machine, with Docs, Gmail, Chrome and so on, and this is a step towards eliminating the local drive altogether. Naturally we still all have fairly slow uploads, compared to local hard drive speeds, but it’s coming. I recently spoke to an anonymous Google employee, who said G-drive is already running internally in the Google offices – but I think we already knew that. Still, good to know, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this – there have been quite a few different “online sightings” of things related to the project recently, so it’s probably nearer than it has been.

These are a few simple examples of things that are down-to-earth current cloud computing, that we don’t necessarily see as such. Do you have any examples? Leave a comment.