Working in The Cloud Update

At Barcamp Gold Coast about a month ago I gave a talk entitled ‘Working in The Cloud’ with slides. I subsequently produced a slidecast of a more general version of this talk. My Information Work Online Experiment (InfoWOE) started my down the cloud computing path and is documented in other posts.

In a comment to this slidecast, David Tangye left some very detailed thoughts on the topic that were worthy of a blog post of his own. One of his opening remarks tells of Larry Ellison of Oracle in the 1990s using the term ‘network computing’ which has now become cloud computing.

In my short talk I described my aim to work completely in the cloud and listed the Web 2.0 cloud applications that were making it increasingly possible (I estimate 70-80% of the way there). During the talk and subsequently I asked others to take a short survey to see if they are using the same or similar cloud applications. This survey will remain open and I encourage everyone to complete it whenever they read this.

As I write this 17 responses have been received. The 10 questions on this free SurveyMonkey survey ask about cloud apps for email, calendar, social networking, real-time comms, wikis, blogs, links, document management, specialist tasks including media and software development (the weakest section for cloud apps). I summarise the reactions to date:

Cloud App	Comments
Email	81% Gmail, 44% Outlook web access, with odd mentions of Yahoo, Hotmail, Roundcube, Orange and @Mail
Calendar	60% Google, 40% used no calendar, single mentions of Exchange and iCal
Social	88% Facebook, 77% Twitter, 18% Myspace with LinkedIn (4), Bebo, Friendfeed, Ning and Yammer
Real-time	Poor coverage by cloud apps with Skype text and voice in use by 50% with 18% not using any
Wiki	43% used no wiki, 43% used wikis, 29% SharePoint, mentions for PBwiki (2), MediaWiki (2), Drupal, Liferay, Twiki, Joomla, Plone, Blackboard
Blog	38% WordPress, 31% Blogger, 31% none
Links	55% none, 46% Delicious, Foxmarks (2), own website (2), Google Bookmarks, Connotea, digg, flur
Documents	69% Google Docs, 31% none, 13% Zoho, Office Live
Specialist	86% Youtube, 79% RSS reader, 64% Flickr, 43% slides, 36% Mind maps, 29% tasks, 21% Twitpic, 14% CRM, 14% project management, Slideshare (3), Remember The Milk (2), Picasaweb, Mindmeister, Bubblus, Feeddemon, Evernote, Highrise, Basecamp

It is interesting to see that the tech-savvy Barcamp audience have similar habits and use a remarkably tight set of cloud apps. There were few surprises other than the weight of one cloud app against another. I am hoping more people will take the survey that hopefully will increase the range of cloud apps being used out there.