Wednesday, August 14, 2013

When Apps meet cloud storage: Upcoming trends?


quick snippet:

There have been two major developments in the consumer web in the last couple of weeks. Google announced the integration of GMail with Google Drive and Dropbox announced Dropbox chooser. With the GMail-Google Drive integrations, GMail users can now send links to files up to 10GB stored on Google Drive from inside the GMail interface. With Dropbox chooser, websites developers can allow users to access the photos, docs and videos in their Dropbox from within the web application.
While both announcements garnered their fair share of press attention, most failed to notice that these developments are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the tectonic shifts afoot in the cloud computing space.
This integration of consumer cloud storage with the applications represents an interesting trend — one that Filepicker.io, my company, has been actively catalyzing and aggressively pushing forth on for a while now.
So what are these tectonic shifts, and what does it means to enterprise and independent developers, as well as ultimately to users?
The Death of Local Storage
Notice that both the Dropbox and the Google Drive developments are a marriage of storage with applications. Users are increasingly storing their content online in platforms and that means the death of local storage  is near.
Facebook has become my defacto online photo hard drive, while friends with DSLRs use Picasa or Flickr for this purpose. I’ve passively collected a lot of family photos and work PDFs in Gmail. Evernote stores my memories. Google Docs, Box, Alfresco and Office Live have my documents. Even Youtube or Vimeo keeps a cache of my favorite videos. Users don’t realize it fully yet but the content you care about lives online now.


No comments:

Post a Comment