Being dependent on applications in “the cloud”

Vonage’s dashboard page has been down all morning. This is the place where all features of the service can be tweaked like voicemail, forwarding phones and so on. Fortunately this hasn’t been a deal killer for us today, but it reminds me of my increasing dependence on service levels for applications that live in the cloud (i.e., hosted applications served via the Internet).

More of my life is entangled with Google (Gmail; Reader; Notebook; Analytics) and when there is a hiccup with email specifically, much of my communication grinds to a halt.

This Vonage “upgrading” is bothersome since there isn’t any convenient way to perform tasks with Vonage offline (I could do it via the phone itself, but the help system is online!). Google Gears is interesting as is other offline use for other Web applications, but if you haven’t sync’ed recently and the hosted application goes offline, it’s a moot point.

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1 Comment

  1. Clarence Fisher on June 20, 2007 at 1:51 pm

    I’ve run into this same problem at school over the past three weeks as our server died and needed to be rebuilt (2X). Makes me more interested in ideas of access and making sure that kids can get the tools when they need them; and what the consequences are for learning when we can’t.



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About Steve Borsch

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Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.