Year: 2010

The problem is this — if Facebook goes away — and it could, so does everything everyone created with it. Facebook investors and developers like Joe (who I respect enormously) probably aren’t worrying about this, because necessarily everything they do is tied up in the success of Facebook. Now if Joe can show me, in his architecture based on the iPad, where all my work is mirrored in a service I pay for, like Amazon S3, in a simple format I and others can write software against, then I can relax and look forward to the future he, Brent and Miguel want to create. But if my work is tied up in their success, then the price is too high. I’ll take the lower fidelity but open playing field of the netbook, and keep my own data on my own hard drives, and back it up as I see fit. And continue to exercise my First Amendment rights.

via Scripting News.

Dave really wants to keep control over his data, and that is a Good Idea. His fear is that the iPad is just an extension of the Apple Silo that lulls us into storing our in proprietary spaces were it exists at the mercy of large corporations. In a nutshell Dave wants to be able to use HTTP to get data on and off the iPad. That capability provides us with the ability to easily move our data around. And we need that sort of portability for our data.