Web 2.0 Needs Trusted, Online Information Storage

In Internet Observation  ||  2007 ||  Tags: Online Storage   Web2.0  ||  Readers: 420

 Every platform worth its salt needs its own permanent information storage and Web 2.0 is no different. Recently I've talked about client side solutions like AMASS and TrimQuery which do very cool things to allow large amounts of permanent storage on the Web client. However I'm betting that client side storage is not going to be the solution for most people's Web 2.0 information storage needs. As Microsoft clearly realized with Windows Live and Office Live, people now have laptops, work PCs, home PCs, and mobile devices with important data and applications on each. Keeping all this data and software synchronized is a huge problem that centralized, online storage can solve. Heck, I feel the pain now, I have a new laptop that's been gathering dust for weeks since I don't have time to transfer all my data to it.

Enter Web 2.0 to solve the problem. Keep your data online all the time and within easy reach by a permalink, right? Social data gathering sites like del.icio.us make it easy to keep tidbits of useful information available at your fingertips. Even Flickr allows you huge amounts of server-side storage for private storage of images. But both of these services are specific to certain types of data and aren't under the fundamental, long-term control of the user. And they often don't even allow data to be marked private!

Generic storage on the Web brings up a whole morass of issues and ones that really need to be solved for Web 2.0 to be central and relevant to us in our daily lives.



First is the trust issue. Like Michael Parekh recently said, "Look, I don’t *trust* your site to keep my personal (and definitely not my professional) data safe, okay, and I’m not going to change my daily habits to include a site that may disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow."

Second, is the ability for Web 2.0 sites to allow users to specify their own preferred vendor for permanent online storage of things like documents, music, images, video, or whatever. Fortunately, half of this problem is solved. There are numerous secure, online storage services today (StreamLoad, Box, Flipdrive, xdrive.com, and many, many others), though none of them are well known, trusted brands at the moment. And the long-term stability of such services is an open question for now (but if Google, IBM, or Microsoft got into the business, that would be something.)

Third, there is the issue of standardization. There is no generally accepted way for online storage to be accessed securely by third party Web services. This makes it impossible for you to use Num Sum or 37Signals apps to do your work and then keep the data created by these services stored in a place that you choose and that you trust. The person or organization that solves this problem in a easily used, generally accepted way is probably going to do very well indeed.

And yes, I know, you can manually export your data from many of these applications today if you want, but it's not easy, straightforward, or useful. And it's time consuming. To be successful, Web 2.0 3rd party information storage must be automatic and painless, once set up.

Going back to the trust aspect of Web as a platform, establishing data havens that are protected by all prying eyes including governments, tax collectors, lawyers, hackers, and those just seeking to cause mischief will actually be very hard. Neal Stephenson's Cryptomonicon most famously painted a vision like this a few years ago with the concept of the offshore data haven: "The concept of a data haven is relatively simple: information is stored offshore (probably in some small, island nation) with super-strong encryption and high-speed links to other countries. The concept has been raised many times before, perhaps most notably in Cryptonomicon. There are many challenges to the execution of a data haven, but it´s clear the time has come." This level of trust probably has to be available for most folks to move all of their information to the Web. But with many associated governance issues including how to do the secure, escrow of information required by legal entities (financial information required for tax collectors, verification that accounts are child pornography free, subpoena enforcement, etc.), otherwise such information havens could become the province of only the most sophisticated criminals. Big problems indeed, but ones that will need solving for this all to work.

Lastly, reliability is also one of the biggest issues. A local network outage, failure of satellites, breakage of undersea cables, denial of service, and many other factors can affect whether you can access your data and how fast. This issue will make many Web 2.0 services a non-starter for folks until reliability and ubiquity aproach five 9's (99.999%) and there are audits to prove it (especially important if you are trying to bet your business on using this approach.)

For now, raising awareness and encouraging Web 2.0 services to use people's third party online storage will be enough. This includes the creation of simple, secure standards that readily facilitate the use of online storage. All this will be a task that will probably take us many years but will take us to the right place I think. I myself, plan on watching this space since solving trusted, online storage will go a long towards making Web 2.0 a widespread reality in the future.

Drill-down:

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