Jolicloud

Robin Wauters compares the upcoming release of the new netbook operating system Jolicloud to Google’s Chrome OS. Inspired by the iPhone’s Touch Cocoa framework, Jolicloud hopes to make social networking an integral part of its operating system rather than an extra feature added on top of it.

Ed Blachman points out an interesting feature of these platforms for writers: as web-based machines with minimal disk storage, they rely on remote data storage. He writes,

The idea of "living and working on the Web from the ground up" is, if not new -- in some sense, it's The Return of Timesharing -- at least new to people who grew up in the PC era. Some part of the Tinderbox story, for instance, is that Client Apps matter -- that you need to be able to work when not connected, that you want control over your own stuff rather than cede that control to folks elsewhere…
So: how important is local storage and local control to the next generation of writers? How important should it be?
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