This provides these third party websites not only with an easy way for users to create an account, but in some cases access to information that has been previously stored on the website you used your account information from. The upside of this is that you could go to a brand new website you have never been to, say Pandora, and log in with your Facebook account. Then Pandora could check what music you like and suggest stations for you to listen to. The downside, as with most website that make life more convenient is increased access to your personal information.
I think this has a larger overtone for what this post is really about - saving our lives on the internet. In the description above where is your information really stored? Us computer scientists call this the 'cloud'. It's not really on a single computer or server but spread around the internet so it is never lost and can be accessed whenever needed.
Eventually all of our information will be connected in the same way. The music we download, Facebook information, myspace pages, blogs, email, twitter, etc. So the final question is who will benefit from this emerging grid? My hypothesis, as predictable as it may be, is Google. For anyone that has a Gmail account the rate at which your allowed storage increases is a little ridiculous. By expanding their server power as much as possible it seems as if Google is buying stock directly from the internet. The more we use it, the more information we need to store on their servers.
However, I believe that access to that information will remain free provided you are subjected to the occasional creepily targeted ad on the side of your screen. Let's just make sure we spread the information around a little bit so one company doesn't end up owning the internet.
That might be a little bit of an embellishment...I don't really think that Google is going to take over the world but a day after I originally posted this article Gmail went down for about an hour. I makes you think about cloud computer and how we should probably still keep local copies of our files. This is why I think that in the near future there will be companies that make a lot of money providing synchronization services. Similar to the SVN programs we use when writing software. For those of you who are unfamiliar to SVN server they are a way for multiple programmers to work on the same program and upload it to a website. When they upload it the SVN server checks to see if you changed anything that would affect what somebody else changed and lets you know about it. Google provides this service with Gmail where you can have it download all of your mail so you can read it even when you are offline. And when your computer connects with the internet again it will send any mail you have recently written and delete anything off of Google's servers that you deleted off of your personal computer. This ensures that if something goes wrong we can still have access to the files we need but could still take advantage of the 'cloud'.
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