Trust and Reliability on the Web
Tuesday, December 20, 2005I've been thinking about this a lot recently and then 3 things happened all at the same time which motivated me to write something down. Bloglines went off the air for a server move, del.icio.us went down due to a power failure and Jacob Nielson reported that 1 billion people now use the web.
Ive said before that I think all software will move to the web. The web is the new platform. With the outage of my 2 most used web utilities it suddenly felt the same as a hard drive failure on my old desktop PC. No applications available and no access to data.
I hate proprietary file formats. At work we have lots of legacy documents that were written in Wordperfect for DOS. Some of them are password protected. Now these docs are only about 8 years old, but now they are imprisoned in the past.
I hate proprietary devices. I hate having to transfer phone numbers between mobile phones, I hate having to re-key numbers into the cordless phones I just bought at home. The phone directory is already inside my mobile, why can't I access the data from the house phone?
With the proliferation of software and devices sucking our information inside and imprisoning it, there's a revolution starting about the ownership of information. After decades of proprietary abuse at the hands of PC software, the web is suddenly a way out of that situation. For my own documents I only trust one format, plain text. I keep folders of text files. Why do I trust the web? Because it's just plain text.
But that's just me. People are drawn to the web because it makes sense on a simple level; availability of and access to, personal data. Trust and reliability are therefore crucial to the success of web services.
There's much more to say on the topic but I'm still brewing; write more soon.
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