November 2003. That's when I started experimenting with a TypePad account. Very quickly, other bits and pieces began to gather: Flickr, del.icio.us, Basecamp … I remember suggesting that this would be the way forward, web-based apps, and the immediate reply was: 'What happens when they lose your data or the connection goes down?'
Well, there are issues, of course. Recently, TypePad has been
wrestling with server-related problems and Basecamp has been afflicted
with very occasional outages. But these are problems of scaling and
management that, as Web 2.0 businesses get to grips with the market
that exists for these services — the level of demand, the issues that a
global market brings with it (an outage at 9am London time spells real
problems for Europe but may pass relatively quietly in the US) — are being addressed. We are, after all, in at the birth of a
totally new way of doing business, managing educational resources, etc. (And TypePad is now running very fast, by the way.)
And then, about 2 hours ago, my ThinkPad T42p, which is a great machine but has had some (infrequent) problems with its display ever since I bought it in March, went down. I suspect a system board failure. Whatever, it won't start at all. So? I switch to a second machine, am back online — and I don't think I've lost any data as everything significant was running on web-based servers … (When I started home computing, many years ago, MS Word was what I used all the time. Now, I hardly ever open it, let alone print from it.)
Backing-up in full, at home, every evening, is a real drag. If companies exist that will do that for you and will maintain their servers in a condition that is both generally reliable and as responsive as possible for their global users, then it's a no brainer — quite apart from the all the other good things they bring, web-based apps make for a simpler life for all IT-users. This, in the end, is a key thing that Web 2.0 will mean to the man and woman in the street (and being connected, always on, means "the street" will be very important in determining just how big Web 2.0 is).
