Does iCloud have a silver lining?

OK I’ve updated iTunes ready for my iPhone’s iOS5 upgrade and all the tasty new features and iCloud goodness that comes with it.

iCloud is Apple’s way of syncronising all of our devices, it’s a kind of grown-up iTunes hub for all our music, movies, pictures and other stuff besides. It’s another step along the path to truly pervasive media that is accessible 24/7 by whatever device is nearest or appropriate to our location.

iCloud sounds good and I’ve already used it to keep devices in sync when travelling. Well actually synchronising my Son’s devices since most of his digital stuff comes from my Apple Account. Anyway, it does make the whole process much easier.

However, not all clouds come with a silver lining. Earlier this week a cloud service that I use decided to pull the plug on some of its services, leaving a dirty, big, cloud-sized hole in my website.

Delicious.com has been around for many years. It began as a free service that allowed users to share browser bookmarks. This had several advantages; it allowed you to access your bookmarks from any machine or browser, you could share web links with others and it had a great method for tagging content with keywords.

Tagging allows users to create their own method of categorising content. This is different to the fixed category/sub-category taxonomy that might exist in say an eCommerce site.

Tagging is sometimes referred to as a ‘folksonomy’. It’s a structure created by ordinary folk, highly individual and sometimes quite unusual. Which was another appeal of the Delicious cloud: You could browse other people’s ‘folksonomy’ or tags for interesting links. Delicious allowed users to display the tags relating to their bookmarks in a graphic tag cloud. This offered a great way of seeing someone’s interests at a glance. Delicious also provided embedding code, so that users could add tag-clouds to their own websites.

I keep using the past tense here, because many Delicious users are very upset about the fact that the tag-cloud feature was withdrawn after Delicious was sold off by Yahoo to a new company.

Like many people who had invested time and effort into building up a resource of bookmarks, I had a Delicious cloud embedded in my website. It wasn’t on the home page or anything, but did provide content for a links page that was more interesting than a plain old list.

Delicious was a free service, so you could argue that it cost users nothing to build up their bookmarks, but when you think about it, those users made a huge investment in time and effort that ascribed value to the company – a company that was subsequently sold off. Delicious was a neat idea that became a commodity.

The new owners have aspirations for the brand. They are keen to develop a social space, following the user-interface conventions of image-rich web portals. The new Delicious feels like a destination website rather than a distribution platform. Feeding tag clouds on other people’s websites is no longer in their game-plan, or at least that is what their online forums suggest. Old-time users are abandoning Delicious in droves.

I’ve managed to migrate several years of Delicious bookmarks into Google Bookmarks – another cloud service. Google even provide a convenient ‘Import Delicious Bookmarks – New!’ link on their site to encourage people to make the switch.

Great, I’ve got my bookmarks out of Delicious and I thought it would be easy to get some Google plug-in to restore my tag cloud. Wrong!  I follow links to Google Labs where I would expect to find a plug-in… and guess what! That service has been suspended too, leaving a trail of broken widgets and plug-ins in its wake.

Here lies the problem with investing time and entrusting our assets to cloud based services: Those services are proprietary and subject to change. Cloud services are good -  don’t get me wrong!  Google’s enterprise services are genuinely useful, and in the design community, so too are services like DropBox and iDisk which allow sharing of large media files.

There have been lots of changes on Facebook recently. When their ‘Timeline’ feature kicks in, people are going to pour even more photos and personal memories into the Facebook cloud. But what if that cloud service was to disappear like GeoCities did a few years back sending millions of user profiles into oblivion?

Over the coming months, much of our digital media will be absorbed into the new Apple iCloud ecosystem. Steve Job’s legacy is a Billion Dollar server farm in North Carolina that has been built to facilitate this. It’s going to be a big paradigm shift, it’s going to be exciting and extremely useful. So should we submit to the cloud? My instinct says ‘yes’ submit to the cloud (resistance is futile) but it might be wise to think about an exit strategy or backup plan, just in case.

Postscript: 16th Oct 2011 – Delicious user Michael Massing found a hack that has got my cloud back (for now).