I don't want Clouds, I want clear skies

The Cloud is one of the most idiotic things to happen to computing.

The only thing fuzzy about The Cloud is the definition of the word. It's basically a way for large companies to bamboozle you into giving up your privacy.

There's also a lot of wishful thinking reality distortion involved here. Large companies would love it if the only way people could do anything was in The Cloud, because today that word really means "hundreds of thousands of servers," and only large companies have enough capital to afford that, keeping competition out. Hosting companies like Amazon (there, I've said it) love it even more, because they get better utilization of their hundreds of thousands of servers, and therefore of their capital.

This situation should remind you of something: the 70s. This isn't really any different than the mainframe era. Can't afford a mainframe tons of servers? Call Tymshare Amazon!

So why are all these hundreds of thousands of servers needed? In the case of Google or YouTube, it seems pretty straightforward - it takes a lot of space to index most of the Internet and host millions of cat videos. But what about Facebook? What's really on there besides a few hundred (or maybe thousand) photos, links to YouTube cat videos shared by your friends, and your whiny status updates? It's hard to purchase a USB memory stick that would be small enough not to fit all that three times over.

It turns out there are a lot of other things on Facebook. Things like your click stream (ie - things you don't care about), which is needed for analytics (ie - using statistics to invade your privacy) to better serve you advertisements (ie - make you buy things you don't want).

The only reason Facebook needs to be "web scale!!!" is so they can sell ads. The only reason they're selling ads is because millions of people signed up for Facebook. The only reason millions of people signed up for Facebook is because it's the easiest way to share photos, links to cat videos, and important news about where they had lunch with their friends (oh yeah, and play Farmville or whatever).

Putting it this way, it's obvious why Facebook needs to sell ads - their service isn't valuable enough to you to get you to pay for it. So it's certainly not worth your time to set up your own web server with a bunch of pub/sub protocols and get all your friends to do the same so you can log into your MyFace social network to post inane status updates and grow virtual beets from other random computers connected to the Internet. That's hard, and who wants to pay for hosting?

Except you and your friends already have one or more computers connected to the Internet. What if it was easy?