WebOS (huevos in Spanish): Your computer in the cloud

We are all day listening to the tech news and they talk about the future, Google making this new Google OS that will be open source and will be basically in the cloud.
Amazon offering cloud space and processing power.

Are we going to live in the cloud in the near future?

Some people have gone one step further, and have developed sort of operating systems (pretty basic) in the cloud. When I say the cloud I mean that they are not hosted in your PC but they are in the “Internet”, so wherever you go, supposely that you have an internet connection, you might be able to access your email (that would be imap protocol) via a webmail client (such as gmail) or your files iDisk, or whatever.

This operating systems (OS) in the cloud (webos) try to be like a computer on your browser. In the same way you have your Windows, with your start button, your applications, photos, files, etc… These services provide you with cloud space and a set of applications to install in your virtual pc.

You can have to kind of OS: hosted by them or that you can host yourself.

I will highlight a couple on the first category:

• g.ho.st

Ghost is one of the best. They offer for free 15Gb of storage using Amazon s3 services. You can share your desktop for collaboration purposes and you can use zoho or google docs office suits.

• cloudo

Cloudo is pretty cool. It is build on a LAMP server (linux with Apache, MySQL and PHP) but they also host it. Looks like it is not open source though. They have an API for developers to develop their stuff in cloudo. I could not see how much space they give you for free. What I saw it that you can make it look as a windows vista, a macos or whatever you want. Pretty cool.

On the second category:

• Eyos

Eyos is open source and you can host it in your own servers, so no limits. It is pretty good too.  I would probably choose this one for precisely this reason.

All can provide schools and universities a full web platform where students, teachers and parents will have a personal yet collaborative desktop to work, communicate between them and get organized inside and outside the school. The Students and teachers will have an intuitive and easy-to-learn Desktop System, to work with school resources and communicate with other students and teachers. Also for personal use, for your photos documents, and even to share part of them.

They have interal communcation tools, so they are great for collaboaration, but again…

Are you ready to live in the cloud?

In my case not at any price. Google OS will be good because they have the Google Gears that would allow you to keep it all offline and continue working in the train.

In fact, I wonder who would be using this sort of solutions. Some will rather have a place with shared files and continue having all distributed: photos in flickr, email with gmail, contacts  with mobile me, etc…

Honestly I don’t see the point on browsing inside one of these or using zoho or google docs. Why not use them in the regular way?

I have to test it more… but for the time being I am a bit esceptical.

Here you have a more extended list: