More cloud talk

I've been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets more and more. It's actually more than suitable for knocking out simple documents, and the ability to use it as a collaboration tool is very smart.

My experience with Google Reader has also been very positive. Finally a way to keep my RSS feed reading synchronised between work, home and away! And today I've managed to go another step towards living on the cloud: Yahoo! Bookmarks.

The old Yahoo! Bookmarks was a bit rubbish - too difficult to manage. So what does the new one have that improves on locally managed Bookmarks (beyond the obvious), and why not use Google Bookmarks? The killer feature of Yahoo! Bookmarks for me is the ability to save a copy of the page and view bookmarks using thumbnail images. All wrapped up in a nice AJAX interface.

So the cloud experience is going well. There are still concerns about backing up - perhaps something the Google and Yahoo APIs will address, and the concerns about privacy won't go away (but then I'm not storing personal sensitive details in the cloud).

Of interest is the ability to access data from anywhere. Google have created a Java application for my k800i phone that provides a really decent interface to Gmail. Yahoo have similar offerings, so I'll be doing some further investigation into that soon...