It’s All Headed for “The Cloud”

I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with this move of all your essential files (docs, videos, music, and pictures) to cloud computing, but it seems Apple is close to inking a deal with all the music labels to offer cloud-based services to its users of iTunes. I already use a variety of cloud services like Gmail, Dropbox, Flickr, You Tube, Barnes and Nobel (for my Nook). But this is new in that, all your audio and video will be in the cloud. The convenient thing about this is that you can listen to you music on your smart phone, iPad/Slate device and laptops without re-importing the files. If you ever lose your iPad, iPhone, laptop, or your home computer dies (as ours recently did), you have all those files in another location. All you need to do it connect to you account and all your music and video is there.

So, in anticipation of this, I finally started using my Amazon account to upload music files from my home computer to their cloud service. Yes, it takes time to upload your files (not as long as you would expect), but this week I’m going to see how much music I can upload so I can listen to songs at work.

Right now, I use MOG to stream music, and while I like it, it sometimes has hiccups on the mobile app that won’t allow me to listen to songs, and the site can sometimes lose your login info — and then reverts to playing 30 second clips. Plus, MOG’s customer service isn’t good at all. I’ve sent two emails to them, but no answers. For $9.99 a month, one would think they could at least answer questions from subscribers.

Anyway, any thoughts on the whole cloud computing thing? It seems like there’s a loss of “I control my stuff on my computer.” But really, have we really been in control of our “stuff?” With all the licensing agreements you, um, agree to when installing programs on your computer, it seems like we’re all just renters at some level.