After almost 2 years of trying (you can’t fault me for giving up too easily) I finally gave in and sold it to a friend who has now completely converted to a Mac household! It was liberating, I finally got rid of that one thing that was niggling at me.  Ok, well it wasn’t the only thing but it was the thing most easily removed from my life, so its gone.  Almost immediately I felt lighter, happier and full of hope.  My plan was to get me one of those shiny new Netbooks everybody is talking about.  The plan was perfect, I only needed something to browse the web, do a few emails, and maybe a bit of video Skype action.  My primary machine was, and still is, a heavy duty Dell XPS 630i with lots of grunt and a slightly flawed operating system so my laptop didn’t need to be a big powerful machine…or so I thought!

After a bit of a wait I got my Dell Mini 1210 machine about 2 weeks ago.  Its the 12″ netbook variety.  I popped it out of the box, booted it up and within an hour it was loaded with what I need, connected to my network, and sharing my iTunes library, my printer, and my ADSL connection flawlessly (I’d like to see anyone do that with a windows network and a Mac! Hah!)

But that is where the joy ends.  After a couple weeks getting used to the slightly smaller than normal keyboard the thing I can’t get used to, refuse to accept, and can’t figure out how to remedy, is that it just doesn’t have the processing power to do what it is advertised to do.  I’m not running MS Office or any resource heavy applications.  I’m not playing PC games or MMP’s or even running a lot of video.  I just want to browse the web without it slowing to a halt every 2 minutes or locking up because I refreshed a page. 

In the end, I’ll probably get rid of that too and settle down with a nice comfortable mid-range laptop. Its too bad though, the netbook craze really seems to be much ado about nothing.  Without the processing power to be of real day-to-day use I don’t really see the value even if they are cheap.

        

There are several models for how this might happen.  Creating a virtual IT storehouse on the web where many IT functions, hardware, and services are wholly controlled by the enterprise is deemed an Internal Cloud.  In many ways this is the “baby step” approach advocated by those who beleive IT groups will resist any change to their authority or control.  While  providing on-demand resources, pay-as-you-go pricing, and the appearance of infinite scalability, a private cloud doesn’t quite provide the economies of scale that you might see from an approach that “upsources” the whole shebang to a Public Cloud. 

A Public Cloud is a more radical and controversial approach.  By almost completely eliminating the requirements of a traditional IT department in favour of a publicly maintained environment, an organisation could limit their IT department to simple management of data via an access method as simple as a browser or similar terminal application.   This is a revolutionary approach as compared with the evolutionary approach of an Internal Cloud.  While economies of scale and overall cost reduction are chief benefits, other risks such as security do remain. 

This leads many to the inevitable conclusion that the answer is to take the public cloud and cordon off a place for the enterprise to access and control.  The idea of  “upsourcing” to the web but still maintaining control is called a Private Cloud.  A Private Cloud takes advantage of some of the economies of scale that the Public Cloud offers but retains some of the security and control of an Internal Cloud at a more reasonable cost.  Resources may be owned by the enterprise, consumed from a public cloud provider, or some combination of the two.

My view is that Private Cloud’s will evolve into what I call a Virtual Private Cloud.  Private Cloud’s still carry a higher cost than a completely public cloud and so the unending quest to reduce cost will drive data to become dispersed into the public domain but retain security and access rights.  This won’t happen overnight as a lack of security protocols and the inertia of today’s IT departments will resist it until their last dying gasps.   But eventually, as it always does, efficiency and cost reduction will win out and all of our data will be thrown into the wind to be gathered into the cloud for your consumption on demand.

        

Well it didn’t take that long or that much effort to find what I was looking for.  Ping.fm is the Write Once Post Everywhere application I’ve been searching for.  For those of you with multiple social media accounts this is your carpel tunnel salvation.  Sign up for a Ping account and you can post a status update to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks like LinkedIn, Plaxo and Bebo just to name a few.  One of the best features of Ping is that you can update your status via email, IM, Text, and even from your iPhone with their web application.  You can even update your wordpress blog (I haven’t tried that yet but my next entry might be worth a shot) if you feel like posting the blog to your other accounts.  Currently I’m using Ping to update Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition to exploring the WordPress option I’ll be looking into how to  link into my ning private social network called Chatter.

        

It occurs to me, while posting to my Facebook account, my Twitter account, my Yammer account, this blog, and my private social network that a lot of time can be wasted just telling people what you’re doing. What I need is an application that allows me to write once and post everywhere I want to post, I’ve coined the acronym WR.O.P.E to represent this idea.

I’m aware of a few tools out there that allow you to aggregate feeds from many sources but I don’t know of any tools that aggregate posts to several different media outlets.  If anyone out there knows of a good application that does this I’d love to hear from you.