Cloud, cloud cloud cloud… heard it enough? Hope not, this post is about clouds. The internet is full of cloud at the moment. Will the cloud take us all and connect us permanently to the internet? Or are we hanging on to a disconnected part of our digital lives? I took a dive in into the clouds to see where it would take me.

The first thing I did was install a cloud operating system. It still requires some installation, but after that, you’re floating somewhere in the clouds. This is where my first issue with the current cloud peeks around the corner. “Login or set up an account if you don’t have one” … great, more passwords to remember. Almost every cloud app I’ve used required me to set up an account. For some apps that’s not an issue as I had accounts for them already, but still, want to add an app, there is a good chance you need an account to take full advantage of the app. In some cases there is no way around it (for the OS itself for example), but for a news app that needs to display Dutch news instead of United States?

Accounts aside, it did all work. I had my documents (Dropbox/Skydrive), I had my music (Spotify) and my social stuff was there as well (Facebook, Twitter and Pidgin). With my Windows Live account I could access Office Live to edit my documents (part of this post was written in the cloud).

This is where we get to the real issue I see in the clouds. They are my files and folders on both Dropbox and Skydrive, but who’s to say they are safe and secure (this applies to all the stuff you can put in the cloud)? And what happens when my files go missing? What if I want to move all my stuff to a service that suits me better? Who can still access them after I delete my account? Privacy peeks around the corner as well, but I’ll skip that one.

I think the cloud is a great invention but are we heading towards an internet where everything is stashed away in a place we do not fully control? As it stands right now, I’m not ready yet to fully commit to the cloud, are you?