danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. apophenia is her blog.
In this post, she relates a story from a friend of hers, who centralized virtually all of his online life (and therefore, his life) on Google products, only to have his account erased by Google because of a fraudulent phishing attack. The story raises concerns about storing all your data in one place and with one company.
Mozilla is currently testing out something called "Weave," a tool that would allow you to synchronize your content on multiple browsers, via a hosting option similar to what Google does.
This goes a step beyond Google, because Mozilla is, of course, a desktop application. So Mozilla Weave would have access to your desktop behavior and the stuff you store on their servers.
Article from Harper's Magazine about how much Google's server farms are polluting a river in the Pacific Northwest.
Google Docs--but at what cost?


