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Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

I think we need a better name for his decentralization concept because what he's describing is actually centralization: you're storing your data elsewhere which makes it accessible everywhere (the nearest screen as he calls it). That elsewhere is a central place.

We will have specialized services for this centralization(e.g GMail for email, picassa for photos) and also services that span multiple types of data. Thinking in these terms makes Facebook look a lot more interesting: it is a central place that hosts multiple types of your data in one place, and they are working on making it available to more screens - some of which are not yours!

He makes the argument that we (the consumers) are the product that Google and Bing sell, and argument already made for TV watchers. By the same token, a Facebook user is much more valuable than a search engine user because FB knows so much more about them.

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You're right that the word is slightly misleading, because it could be seen both ways, but it is also clearly decentralisation.

In the previous model, all your data, email, media, etc is on your computer, your hard drive, a single point that you are in control of. In the new model, your photos are on Facebook, your emails are on Gmail, your tweets are on Twitter, your bookmarks are on Delicious, your data is on Dropbox, your music is on Spotify, your movies are on Netflix, etc... It's not centralised to one location, it's split up from one location (your computer) into potentially hundreds of locations owned by a variety of paymasters with different agendas. So, it is decentralised.

From the point of view of the collective, it's centralisation (data goes from many entities into a single entity) but from the point of view of the individual, it's decentralisation (data goes from a single entity to many entities).

Recently I wrote "...user data is scattered among many web properties..." In essence it is "data scatter" Decentralization, in my mind, implies some sort of planning on where to put data (say to prevent failure or enhance efficiency...) but I don't think users plan.

I don't partically like the terminology "the cloud," but it is becoming ubiquitous. So, "cloudification" might work.

>...decentralization...

Let's call it de-specification. Utilizing cloud services, you can no longer specify where that data resides, apart from the tag we use to identify the provider; 'Gmail', 'AWS', etc.

You can specify the provider of the container for your data, but you cannot specify or define the container in which that data resides.

This article is great, I have been following these trends for some time. Starting with the CyberPunk RPG game, which interestingly is based in 2020 which we played in the late 80's-early 90s..

The premise is that in CyberPunk the world is run by global corporations and technology is an integral filiment in the fabric of life, if not life itself. Machines and technology and information operate outside of and on top of humanity and increasingly requires less and less of human individuality to exist and profit.

M2M communication is something I wrote about while at Lockheed - where the premise was that RFID based communications was a layer of data that had yet to reach maturity. We were talking about the capabilties of autonomous sensor networks that monitor and report on all aspects of their nodes, with respect to military hardware you have weapons which are IDd and tracked for location. They are in containers which are monitored for environmental conditions and security. If a container with a certain type of munition has too much Gshock the munition arms itself - thus the location, environment and events are all monitored and reported on with alert thresholds being set to escalate alerts to appropriate parties. Inventories are gathered and stored on tags for lookup - and a complete view of all resources is accessible.

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