I could have been a contender, if it wasn't for that power cord.
In the inward-looking world of blogs, see, one sure way to gain credibility is to have been around forever. Bloggers who have been at it since 2001 are considered greybeards; bloggers from before then get the same kind of reverence as Lucy's skeleton. Tell us, supplicants ask, what did it feel like to crawl out the primordial guck?
My blogging career began and ended in 1997. I was a freshman, recently arrived at the University of Nowhere Spectacular, a campus whose saving grace was that every room came equipped with high-speed Internet. Blogs as such weren't around in those days, but people were already setting up free homepages and rambling away.
Seeing which way the wind was blowing, I signed up with Angelfire and started typing confessionals. The first and only one that made it online was a masterpiece of angst - the named parties still complain about it to this day. The second one was a travelogue that described, in great detail, a one-hour ride on a VIA train. Alas, just as I edged my mouse toward the "Save" button, I kicked the power cord. The screen flickered out, and the world was spared.
I was too disheartened to start again; my page joined the millions of other abandoned efforts floating around the ether. My blogging career was nipped in the bud, and I was eventually reduced to writing newspaper articles.
But the bias I acquired that day stuck with me: Never, ever type anything of value into a Web browser. It's so easy to accidentally close the window, or click the "Back" button, or kick the power cord, or lose the Internet connection, or open one too many YouTube videos and watch the browser melt elaborately. Desktop programs are for creating, and the Internet is for sharing. Using one for the other's purpose is a non-starter.
This is the lens through which I've watched the years-long parade of reports telling me that the future of software is online. Instead of installing software on our computers like we do today, people will just log into websites that do the same thing as the programs we used to buy in boxes.
The idea is catching on: Everything from tax-filing software to Photoshop replacements have appeared in online form, with varying degrees of success. As an exercise in mental expansion, I'm typing this column in Google Documents (http://docs.google.com), which has a free online word processor. It's Spartan but functional, and seems designed to set my mind at ease. It won't let me close the window accidentally, for instance, and it auto-saves my work just as compulsively as Microsoft Word does.
This week, Adobe - a company that's done very well selling software in boxes - made headlines by announcing that it was jumping into the ring with the purchase of Buzzword (http://www.buzzword.com), a slick online word-processor. It's still rough around the edges, but already it's more appealing to look at than Word.
The benefits of software that you subscribe to rather than buy are manifest. For one thing, software makers won't be forced to sustain themselves by selling "upgrades" full of features you don't want that only make the software worse. For another, your data is much safer - physically, anyway - on a server farm deep in the bowels of Google than it is on the laptop next to your coffee mug.
And still, there's something off-putting about the concept of doing office work online. I might just be clinging to my biases on that front, but I don't think I'm the only one.
It's not just the thought of losing data accidentally; rather, it's that I'm clinging to a desire for ownership and privacy. The notion of everyone going to work and logging on to the great communal hive to engage in their quotidian tasks of content-generation sounds a little communist, or dystopian, or Borg. Desktop computing evokes personal creativity and self-sufficiency. Doing everything online conjures the vision of lurching around as helplessly as a suit in a BlackBerry outage.
Some of the threats, of course, are more down to earth. Buzzword's terms of service, for instance, forbid obscene or pornographic content. The company tells me that their policy prohibits them from snooping through the documents you store with them, but adds that if someone files a complaint, they'll act. The thought of restrictions on what you can and cannot type into a word processor is unpalatable enough to turn off most users.
Buzzword is also an omen of things to come in another respect. Right now, it's a website you log into like any other. But soon, the company says, it will release a version that runs on the desktop as well as in a Web browser. This hybrid approach comes courtesy of something called Adobe AIR, a technology that lets online applications work even when there's no Internet connection.
Applications built like this provide the advantages of online sharing, while retaining the comforts - however illusory - of desktop computing. I suspect that this will prove popular; the desktop metaphor is remarkably tenacious. It was supposed to ease reluctant users into the world of computing, but it's wound up instilling a proprietary sense of "one's own domain" in computer users.
That's a hard thing to give up. For all the talk of the world of online applications, it could be a while before desktop software - in one form or another - gets completely unplugged.
