This is a really good idea (thx Tim):

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to „liberate“ their products.

Where data goes when it dies. Chris Messina writes about ma.gnolia's data loss and other things.

The act of deleting my entire music library (okay fine, I do have a complete backup on my Mac Mini media center) was cathartic. All that data... in an instant, gone. All those ratings, all that metadata, all those play counts revealing my accumulated listening habits. Gone [...].

Things magazine on Google Latitude:

Latitude is one of those quiet paradigm shifts that we have anticipated for so long that it comes as no surprise when it actually becomes a viable technology. The idea that we could see instantly where family and friends are on a map is almost as natural as the idea that we could be contacted via phone wherever we are in the world. [...] There is, of course, this.

Very likely, in the near future, I won't "own" any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won't buy – as in make a decision to own – any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won't own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to "own" it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.

It's hard to pick a good quotation from Kevin Kelly's "Better Than Owning" because at first, the text is pretty easy to agree with but becomes more and more questionable when Kelly starts to write about shared ownership of clothing.

Why you should have a web site. This post by Jeremy Keith seems to be a transcript of a talk given by Steven Pemberton at XTech 2008.

What if you want to move your photos from one website to another? How do you choose which social networking sites to commit to? What about when a Web 2.0 site dies? This happened with MP3.com and Stage6. Or what about if your account gets closed down? There are documented cases of people whose Google accounts were hacked so those accounts were subsequently shut down – they lost all their data.

These are examples of Metcalfe's law [link added] in action. What should really happen is that you keep all your data on your website and then aggregators can distribute it across the Web.

An article at Ars Technica about web-based operating system look-alikes. I doubt that this is how computer technology is going to evolve. It might be the obvious choice to re-implement a desktop environment that runs in a browser, but the approach is too narrow and too centralizing to be successful. The web is about data, not about software or about clients.

I read two posts introducing HTTP music streaming applications lately: ZX2C4 Music by Jason Donenfeld and musica by Dustin Kirkland. Storing my music collection in a central accessible place is something I wanted to do for a long time but setting up a home server has always seemed like a big waste of energy and money to me. As there are web hosting plans with unlimited space and bandwidth available for $10, uploading everything to a web server might actually be an option. Although I can't help but think that it's a pretty strange thing to do.

Kevin Kelly thinks about the „culture of cloudiness“, i. e. what will happen when we move more and more – and eventually all – of our personal information into the digital cloud that is the Internet.

Privacy is over. Or more precisely, privacy as we imagined it is over. The extended self requires a different finesse for grappling with the levels of intimacy humans need. The binary functions of public/private, or even friend/not friend have to yield to more nuanced, more complex ways to describe our relationships.

I’m always in the need of more nuanced visibility settings when I open an IM client. Go future!