The Cloud Fiasco of 2010: Drop.io

This is nothing new to me. A company shows up with a good idea. It encourages people to use its services. The service is good, and the company says it has premium services, which are even better, but you have to pay a little money. You pay, and you begin to rely on the service even more. Then the company sells itself to some other company that closes the service down, leaving you hanging.

Welcome to .

I have complained about the fly-by-night nature of these companies for years, but my concern now seems misplaced. I was concerned about operations that you depend on for deep cloud services. This means complex programs running on the cloud with no real alternative. Over time, I've tended to see these companies as more stable than the "Use our free service. You won't regret it!" model.

I was taken to task by numerous vendors who kept telling me that I was full of crap, because cloud services are professionally managed, and nobody could do the job—whatever the job was—better than a room of pros. With the cloud, the pros would also keep the data safe.

Yeah, until they were all laid off, and the service shut down!

Now here's the problem I am experiencing second-hand. The audio podcast I do with Adam Curry, the No Agenda Show (Google it), has been using Drop.io to store podcast album cover images for convenience. They will all be destroyed, as well as the accumulation of links, tips, curiosities, and other valuable information, in the next few weeks.

Looking back on the idea of using this service, I didn't fully consider the ramifications of its discontinuance despite my skepticism about cloud services in general. You know, this was just a lot of weird stuff thrown into a bin. But once it was discontinued, it was apparent what you are left with: dead links.

Dead links are the one thing about cloud services that I have not yet complained about. I'm not sure why I never noticed this issue before, probably because I use a minimal number of cloud services. But now that I think of it, I am constantly running into dead links from defunct Geocities sites and AOL sites, and most of my bookmarks are dead links.

Here's a challenge for you. Go to an older machine you may have taken offline and dig up your favorites folder full of old bookmarks. Start clicking on those bookmarks, and see what you get. I have folders full of bookmarks to once cool sites that are all dead links now. Essentially, everything on the Web is based on some sort of cloud service. Look at the dead links. It's like a bone yard. Blame the cloud. You've basically wasted years of effort saving cool Web sites with bookmarks for no reason.

The few old links that still work are miracles. And a few are able to tell you that "this site has been moved to..." Everything else is a dead link. Even if you could Google these dead pages for the cache, you'll find it has long since expired. And the Wayback machine at archive.org is fairly useless for most of these dead pages, too.

So I want to personally thank Drop.io and it's new owner Facebook for giving me one more good reason to complain about cloud computing: dead links. Thanks.