In building a personal cloud the first question should be what constitutes a personal cloud? What is important to you? What content needs to be accessible anywhere and at all times? For me, the content is calendaring, contacts, notes, projects and tasks. And it needs to be accessible at various access points: desktop computer, notebook computer, iPhone and any other internet–connected computer or device. Content may enter the personal cloud at any access point and is then distributed to the other access points.
Structure of the Cloud
Flow Through the Cloud
More Flow Through the Cloud
- Mac Leopard native applications: Address Book, iCal and Mail
- Content from native application sync with MobileMe
- MobileMe pushes the content to the iPhone’s native applications:
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Mail (IMAP to MobileMe or Gmail)
- iPhone may access Google Calendar via Safari
- iPhone may access Gmail via Safari
- Google Calendar sync with iCal via BusySync (alternatives: gSync, Spanning Sync)
- Gmail IMAP‘d with Mail
- Address Book sync with Gmail’s Contacts
- Google Calendar sync with iCal via BusySync
- Mac creates/accesses content: Google Docs, Google Sites (wiki), Google Notebook and Google Reader
- iPhone accesses webapps via Safari
- Alternate route to create/access content (including voice messages) via iPhone Evernote application or use Safari to access Evernote webapp
- Created/access content with Mac Evernote application or use Safari to access Evernote webapp
What’s presently missing in the personal cloud: tasks and projects. OmniFocus (or Things) offers a partial solution for desktop and iPhone.
Content is distributed in terms of accessible points, but also in terms of storage. Email is stored in two online sites (Gmail and MobileMe) and one offline site (Mac; Mail rule statement copies all arriving email). Similarly, there are redundant online/offline storage of calendaring and contact content. Google Docs, via Gears, has both online/offline storage.
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[...] # | Tags: cloud computing, iPhone, Moleskine, MS Outlook, personal cloud I’m impressed by Tim’s personal cloud. What’s his personal cloud? Well, it’s everything that he needs, e.g. mail, calender, [...]