I am going to start a series of posts around how Cloud can be realized and experienced by consumers. There is a misconception that Cloud is meant only for hardcore technical folks like developers, administrators and IT managers. Though it may not be positioned as Cloud or Software as a Service (SaaS) to consumers, most of the traditional applications will be eventually delivered through the Cloud. What the consumers will experience is a familiar user experience delivered either through their favorite browser or a simple UI. Behind the scenes these services respect the tenets of the Cloud like elasticity, self-service, pay-by-use, programmability and multi-tenancy.
Bookmarks / Favorites in the Clouds
How many PCs do you use? Most of us have at least 2 PCs – a work PC and a personal notebook. You may also have a Media Center or additional set of PCs.
How many browsers do you use on your PC? I use at least three browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and occasionally Apple Safari.
With the information overflow through blogs, RSS feeds and Wikis, we end up bookmarking a lot of sites that we come across. The biggest pain is to keep your favorites in sync across the browsers that you use. Not just browsers on the same machine, but across the machines that you use! That’s where the Xmarks service will really come handy.
Xmarks is available as an add-on to Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari. It automatically keeps your favorites in sync. Apart from this, the biggest advantage of Xmarks is that it also maintains a copy of your bookmarks in the Cloud that is accessible at http://my.xmarks.com. When you are using a kiosk or a shared PC, you can always logon to the Xmarks site and access your bookmarks.
Xmarks - Bookmarks in the Cloud
The best thing about Xmarks is it is absolutely free!
As a Cloud Computing Strategist, Janakiram MSV helps businesses understand and adopt the Cloud Computing paradigm. His core strength is designing and architecting solutions for the Cloud. Janakiram focuses on industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings including Microsoft Windows Azure.
