Slashdot Mirror
Lost Gmail Emails and the Future of Web Apps
brajesh writes "Recently some people lost all their Gmail emails and contacts. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of moving all communication online on services like Gmail for your domain(beta). Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird? Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"
You have the potential of losing email anywhere you store it--it's trading the server for your desktop, in a way. Every new solution used en masse will have new problems. I suppose I'm always a lot more worried about hard drive meltdowns then server problems--someone takes a lot better care of those, or so I'm told.
Do we want too? I don't like the idea of somebody besides me having ALL of my data.
I think that is the direction that joe average wants the internet to go. He wants to upload and save all his pics to the net, have all his e-mails accessable via the web from anywhere. He wants his bills e-mailed to him and he wants his banking online. He also likes the idea of accessing his phone messages via his computer.
The traditional desktop was never by choice I dont think. It evolved this way because of technological limitations, lets be honest. If it were from pure design it would be no bigger than a note pad. So my point is yes it will be a reality it's just a matter of companies investing in gurantees. As opposed to just selling a hot service without really backing it up. This applies not only to e-mail but to online sales (security), storage services like flicker and utube (bandwidth and up time).
... why would we really want to move to an online desktop in the first place? The PC revolution moved us away from a mainframe/terminal environment. Why would we want to move back to a similiar model?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good (or bad) idea.
Personally, I don't like the idea of my entire digital "memoirs" being elsewhere where anything can happen to them. Now, it's not a rational fear -- Google has a datacenter, and I'm tapping this out on a five-year-old Athlon T-bird (newer HDs, however). But if something goes wrong here, I have full control. I know the routines for extracting data off of a dead drive. They've spent money to ensure that the likelihood of failure is much, much lower than my old little desktop, but if something goes wrong there, I have no control. Again, not a rational fear -- they're much more skilled than I am at recovering my data. But they're also not going to stay up until 3am just for old e-mails to my family from when I was a freshman in college.
I think one of the things I dislike about Web 2.0 most of all is the fact that all my data is elsewhere. There's a lot to be said for ownership and control. I have no problem with distributed applications, but I want my crucial data no more than 100 feet away.
Those of us who have been using email for two or three decades.
Whippersnapper.
Download my free songs!
will probably never move to an online desktop. (bet you were expecting something about overlords)
(1) I don't want my personal data on another person or groups computer, especially without an option of having my own baackup of all my data. Even with the latter, I'd be leary, but the latter hasn't even happened yet in many cases, so I'm not expecting it to happen soon.
(2) An online storehouse like that would be a hackers dream. I'm not likely to have anything majorly secure on my system, but nonethelless, I'd rather remain a small unimportant target (my PC), than a large glowing beacon of temptation (remote server housing a lot of people's data).
(3) Occasionally ISPs have trouble. I've not seen this with my ISP yet, but I've known a lot of people who have had 4-24 hour downtimes. I don't want to loose access to my documents/data if that ever happens with my ISP.
(4) I don't have to deal with slower (compared to hard drive access) network connections and stressed servers making things slow when I'm using my computer.
(5) If I'm travelling around, and using my notebook, I don't want to have to worry about my documents not being available when I go somewhere that may not have internet access. Kein danke.
I understand 4 can be handled, and so can parts of 2, but I am really *not* keen on using an online desktop except for thnings that are naturally net-dependant anyway (such as email).
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
First, this loss of data by Google doesn't say much about the online vs. desktop storage debate. Chances are that less people have lost email through this recent gmail foul-up than who lost their email because their own computer crashed. It's just that now there's someone to point the finger at.
Aside from that, though, I don't see that online will replace desktop in the foreseeable future -- there's too many things that are cumbersome to do online (like music and video editing) and way too many things that I wouldn't want in someone else's hands. The former might be fixed when we get consistent gigabit broadband (though maybe not if video quality and speed expectation continues to increase), but the latter, I don't know. There's certain things I create that I want to keep to myself.
Cheers.
Given the nature of the internet, will it ever be possible to truly move to an 'online desktop'?"
Sure - As long as the server lives in my home office.
A decade ago I actually had such a setup for a few years, until my ISP decided to actually enforce the vague and arguably impossible "no servers" rule in their TOS. My email went to my home machine, which I could check by SSH'ing in from anywhere in the world. If I needed a file, I could tunnel in, mount a share off my home fileserver, and do whatever I wanted.
XP has actually made that more doable, in that Remote Desktop works pretty damned well even over slow connections. So now I have access to GUI-only information as well (yeah yeah, I used to do VNC or remote X desktops, but even over a broadband connection those crawl, and don't (directly) support sharing any non-GUI resources such as files, printers, and sound).
The problem here comes from our ISPs, who want to sell us something then have us never use it, whether our already meagre upstream bandwidth, or unwritten but strictly enforced monthly caps (*cough* Verizon *cough*). Never forget, in the heat of all the debate on the subject, that "net neutrality" only applies to big companies who view us as consumers of content. We small-scale end users have never enjoyed neutrality.
So to answer the question - We can truly move to an "online" desktop just as soon as enough of us force the ISPs to let us use the bandwidth we pay for however the hell we want. Not before.
What needs to be done beyond actually fixing the bug is for Google to come out with an assurance that folks will be able to restore potentially lost data in the event that something like this ever happens again, otherwise there's clearly no good reason to store anything important on GMail.
That subscript "BETA" under the GMail logo is giving you all the reason anyone should need to avoid storing anything important within GMail. Like many Google products, GMail is still defined as a beta by the company. A well polished beta to be sure; but as long as it says beta on it, you should have no expectation of it remaining static or being 100% stable. They could delete everyones accounts and reset or scrap the whole thing tomorrow, and they would be completely within their rights.
If you want to have expectation of safe retention of mail that goes through GMail, you should use the tools that Google has provided and download it to your PC via POP3. Then YOU can be responsible for its backup and retention.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just pointing out that no one has any right to claim that Google screwed them by losing their important email that they [the user] were housing on a BETA email service.
Your "control" is an illusion, and the potential to lose your data is just as real. In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
In your case you may "think" you're in control, when in fact your last backup copied over the same corrupted data, your archive DVD is now unreadable, and your last full offsite backup is two months old.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It isn't necessary to completely move to an 'online' desktop. Desktops as we know them now have their place, they have their own significant advantages, and I am sure that with time we will all be using both. A lot of people can't imagine an "online desktop," but the next batch of netizens will probably already be accustomed to the idea, and will use it, alongside a traditional desktop OS, be it a linux distro, Mac's OS, or Windows. As for losing all yours emails, shit happens. Anything you have any use for should be: a) copied to own harddrive b) if important enough, printed out
When something's in "beta" for over two years now, it becomes less of a product status and more of an excuse.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Google claims most of their stuff is beta, so that's hardly a defense.
The fact of the matter is that all hard drives fail at some point, and most RAID controllers eventually fail, too. Relying on a service to do backups for you is safer than no backups at all, but it's not sufficient if you have truly important data.
The "innate problem in web apps" is probably closer to reality than you want to admit - companies like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are fighting a battle in scalability. Having multiple redundant backup systems (array + offline backup) makes scaling much, much more expensive than designing a single fault-tolerant, semi-redundant primary system (large array of whatever kind).
If you think all of the massive online media sites (think Flickr, for example) have backups of all of your photos, you're probably mistaken. They certainly have basic protection against single disk failure, but that's not always going to save the data in the event of a catastrophe.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
If you have many email accounts like me, it's handy to have a single interface (the mail client) for handling all of them, instead of having to visit multiple sites a day just to check for new mail (let alone search for a particular message when you're not sure in which account it ended up).
Score: i, Imaginary
I would not call it an 'illusion'. For one reason or another, enthusiasts of on-line services assume their detractors to be technologically inept bozos. That is short sighted. The matter is that I can (and I am forced) to take steps to ensure the security of my data. And I alone am to blame if I fail to do so. There is definitely something to what you wrote. I did realize that when I wrote my post. This is what 'perception of control' was supposed to mean.
Please realize that my arguments against the 'google desktop' are not technical. And not even relate to that company's level of service (even though there is something to be said about it; but this is a beta, so no matter). They are on the level of perception, not the net result (and on a large scale). In a way this is similar to the 'airplane effect'. Everybody knows that overall air travel is way safer then driving. Still, plane crashes are way more publicized then car accidents. And great many people (including seasoned travelers) get an uneasy feeling boarding a plane, while getting into their cars every morning without giving risks they are taking any thought. Why so? I believe the root cause to be the perception of control. Or, as you preferred to call it, an 'illusion'.
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
It's ALL about control. For instance, Microsoft would love to make an OS that you rent rather than buy. Moving large portions of the software industry to a rental model is a software shop's wet dream, and Web Apps are a perfect way to introduce and enforce such a model. What happens when they have your data and the (proprietary) applications to read/write/process that data? Do you think the cost of software will go up or down with their increased leverage? "Okay, you don't want to pay anymore for using Enumerate(c)? That's fine, we'll send you your binary data files in a few months or so. Have fun getting the data out of them." You know how just about every EULA under the sun makes it clear that the software has, essentially, no guarantee as to performance? If web apps have the same lack of guarantee, what leverage do you have if you want to switch to a different software provider? It's the best form of lock-in yet devised.
Of course, people will argue that, 'Of course, we'll still keep local backups', or 'Our computers will not be THAT thin of a client'. Sure they will. Until the killer app comes out that there IS no local version of; Google is making tentative steps in that direction. That's the whole point of FOSS, particularly open document standards - so you, as a user of that data, have the leverage to pick and choose a different software provider, or write code yourself, or hire someone to do it from scratch, to access that data. I have little interest in contributing/participating in a software model that reduces the limited control I have today.
I agree that they probably have better redundancy than the average user, however, if they are taking the responsibility for my data, they should be making backups that can recover in case of data loss. RAID is good, however if a file is corrupt, or deleted, then it is corrupt on multiple disks or deleted from multiple disks.
Are they willing to take on the added cost of backup/storage. If so, how far back to the backups go? How often is the backup run?
If my data is local, then it's my responsibility to make backups.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
If you've got server functions running on your desktop, you don't have either a desktop or a server...
Just junk food for thought...
In fact, a service org probably has RAIDed drives and automated and offsite backup systems superior to what most people are doing on thier own... if they're doing it at all.
I'm having trouble resolving this comment with the topic of the thread, namely "Lost GMail Emails."
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
It's not totally an illusion. Statistically it may be safer to fly but the driving accidents include every moron, 16-year-old, and grandma driving down the road. When I drive I do have some control over whether or not I have an accident. It's not 100% fullproof because there are impossible odds at times but I have personally come out of many bad situations unscathed based on driving skill and/or having a high performance vehicle.
I love flying but only if I'm the one flying the plane.