A spate of recent articles about Cloud Services makes me wonder about them.  Some are nice and concise and others just ramble on.  We link to think of MediaMaster as a useful cloud service.  It lets you get to your music anywhere.  It’s simple, it serves a pupose, and it lets you do more than you can from a home machine.

The bigger companies are trying to cover all of the bases and be like .mac (now MobileMe), but that model does not seem to work very well; it’s very broad and requires integration directly into the OS which only MS and Apple are capable of.  A hard drive in the sky is nice for backup but not very sexy.  However, when you start to add things to make it useful, then you stop thinking of it that way.  Microsoft added special view to My Pictures, My Music, My Videos and others that make them more than just a folder.  We think that MediaMaster does that for music on the web.  Flickr is more a website than a true service in the sky.  You are limited to interacting with it through Web tools (as are we) however, they are making the transition.

The key for Cloud Services is not just to remain in sync with your drive at home, but to add functionality that is not possible (My Radio on MM) or Facebook pages.  The Sync feature is the transition to when things are only online, like Y!Mail and HotMail.  Yahoo! has added other APIs recently to allow other to inteface directly and build their own services with Y! as a backend.  S3 and EC2 from Amazon is very complicated, while XDrive from AOL is just a boring backup service.  Cloud backup is nice for small businesses, and can make money, but it is not fun for the consumer.  The layers on top are the future.