Google Notebook

Posted by Chris Murtland
Jul 14, 2006 at 05:32 PM

Derek,

I pretty much feel the same way. While I use Gmail for lists and some personal mail, I wouldn’t want to entrust my real work email to Google. Also, with Google Notebook, I would only clip general web information and don’t see myself adding in many personal notes of my own. While I think web-based tools have a lot of promise in that they can be accessed from multiple locations without worrying about file synchronizing, when it comes to truly personal information it just seems better (at this point) to have that stored in local software. On the other hand, we do online banking and are entrusting *really* sensitive data to our financial institutions. I’m sure that in the future someone will come up with a web-based solution that offers full encryption of the data (not just the SSL connection in the browser) as well as robust privacy policies that don’t allow the provider or any third parties to access your data in any event.

There’s also the issue of speed and availability. While some web apps have gotten pretty snappy, they still aren’t as fast as a local application. And in the rare cases when an internet connection or the provider’s site goes down, do you really want to be divorced from all your personal information?

I think the trend is in the direction of web apps and online storage, though. I belive there may be a tipping point in the future where having applications and storage online will be safer and cheaper than having it locally. A lot of business applications are already like this; I just don’t think it’s trickled down to the level of individual users yet.

Chris