My Life in the Cloud(s)

In this essay, I explain how I use a variety of Web 2.0 software and applications that store my data “in the cloud” to manage my busy traveling consultant lifestyle. All of the applications I use are free (as in beer), although some are still in beta (meaning that the developers feel they are basically unfinished or unpolished). These apps not only help me keep organized, but they help me keep in touch with people while I’m away from home, and also allow me to bring a piece of home with me wherever I go.

I’m a travelin’ man

It’s no big secret that I travel a lot. Since late last summer, I have been on two flights a week without fail (with the notable exception of holidays and a couple of go-live weekends). My job as a traveling consultant adds some challenges to my personal life that become a lot more manageable with modern-day technology. Using a combination of gadgetry and a few clever web applications, I’ve managed to bring everything together in a way that keeps me productive and sane.

Traveling days themselves are the most hectic, and so they provide the best use case for all of the apps I use. My current gadgetry (I say “current” because these are subject to change pretty soon) to interface with these apps consist of my work computer (a simple Dell D620 laptop) and my handy Blackberry Pearl. Most people who use Blackberries don’t realize their full potential as mobile devices; they typically use them as phones and to check their email. Naturally, I use it for both of those tasks as well, but I’ve added the ability to synchronize my Blackberry calendar with my Google Calendar, and I’ve also installed a couple of other applications that I’ll discuss later in this post.

I should also add that this post is about organizing my personal life while I’m at work, not my professional life. I use Outlook to take care of my day-to-day tasks and appointments at work, and I never sync it with my personal Blackberry. I don’t even check my work e-mail on my Blackberry; this is how I stay sane doing what I do.

The Cloud

By now, it should be pretty clear that I’m on the go all the time, so being tied down to a particular computer is not an option. I want all of my data with me everywhere I go, and have it be easily accessible no matter where I am or what kind of device I’m using. This kind of progressive thinking has the tech world discussing what is being commonly referred to as “the cloud.” Using a variety of new applications (which, by the way, have all sorts of security measures in place to make sure my data is secure all the time), I can keep my information stored “in the cloud” and get it whenever I want and wherever I am. While my experience with the “cloud” isn’t 100% perfect (yet), I think I’ve come pretty close, and I’m always looking for better ways to interact with it.

So what is this elusive “cloud” that I speak of? Without getting too technical, modern web applications both manage and store their data in a “cluster” of servers that are arranged to work together. These servers, which may not even be physical computers, work in parallel and this arrangement is commonly referred to as a “cloud computing.” The name comes from the common representation of server clusters in computer architecture diagrams as clouds. One of the largest advantages to this arrangement is scalability, or basically, creating infrastructure to support lots and lots of users; thousands, even millions of users can be active on a system and everything is easily managed, as new servers are added to the cloud easily.

While data stored on these applications’ servers is generally regarded as safe and secure, there is the notion of being able to “take your data with you” from one service to another. This issue is being addressed by a group called the Data Portability group and while major players like Google and Facebook have made nice with Data Portability, it seems like it’s going to take a little bit of time before the actual data becomes truly portable. However, I find that in the current state of things, having easy access to my data from anywhere at any time takes priority over being able to move it to a different service. That’s not to say I disagree with Data Portability; on the contrary I’m all for it. But I digress. Let’s take a closer look at the actual use of these applications.

Monday Morning Routine

I wake up crazy early on Monday mornings to fly out from Chicago’s O’Hare airport. While traveling via taxi to the airport, I check my itinerary on my phone using the mobile version of TripIt. TripIt is a must-have service for anyone who travels a lot. It automatically “scrapes” confirmation emails sent out from travel services (airlines, rental car companies, hotels, and even travel companies like Orbitz and Priceline) and converts the information into consolidated itineraries complete with maps and weather forecasts of the locations you’re traveling to. All you have to do is forward confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and the rest is magic (when you send out your first email, TripIt creates an account for you). The most valuable feature to me is their iCal feed feature that lets me view my travel complete travel plans in my Google Calendar (hence my Blackberry calendar). There’s even a feature that allows you to see if any of your friends are going to be in the same city as you when you travel, however I have yet to use that feature (I don’t have a lot of friends who travel for work, and I usually know where my coworkers are going anyways).

Another travel application that is worth a quick mention here is Dopplr. Dopplr is more of a social utility as their primary focus is on helping you connect to other travellers that share the same destination as you. However, I discontinued use of the application because it required manual data entry; I’d much rather have a handful of emails forwarded to an address (which I don’t usually even do manually, thanks to GMail’s filters) than have to type in where I’m going in a website every week.

After checking my itinerary, I usually need a good time waster, so I check my RSS newsfeeds on Google Reader mobile. One of the things I love about Google’s applications is that many of their apps have great mobile versions, and Google Reader mobile is no exception. While the average Joe might not use an RSS reader (or even know what one is), tech savvy individuals who like to read several blogs and news websites find that they benefit greatly by using one, and Google Reader is one of the better ones out there. My only gripe with it is that it shows stories in random order; I wish there was a way to organize the chaos a little better. The biggest benefit, however, is that when I mark a story as read using the mobile version, the “online” version syncs to it automatically.

At the airport and on the plane

While I wait for my flight, I might have access to free wifi (depending on which airport I’m at), I’ll usually hop online to sync my Google Reader into offline mode. Offline mode is a new-ish feature in a few Google applications (and non-Google ones for that matter) thanks to Google Gears. A quick, painless install of Google Gears allows me to take my newsfeeds with me in offline mode for reading on the plane. I subscribe to a variety of blogs, many of them tech-oriented such as TechCrunch or Lifehacker, but of course there are oodles of news sources one can subscribe to besides blogs.

Google Docs also offers offline mode (although, at the time of this post, only the word processor has it) which is great since I use it to write drafts of posts for Aashay.com. For those of you who are unaware or unfamiliar with Google Docs (aka GDocs), it’s basically a word processor (like Microsoft Word) and also a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel) application that runs within your browser. It has been one of my favorite applications for a long while now, mostly due to its collaboration features. It allows you to work with other people simultaneously (or asynchronously) on the same documents/spreadsheets, and while this may sound like a gimmick to some, let me tell you first hand that GDocs’ collaboration features helped me get through my senior design project in college. Since I have people serve as guest-editors to my posts here, I write them in GDocs offline mode, sync when I’m online, and invite them to collaborate/annotate on my posts before I post them. It’s seriously good stuff.

To the client

Depending on the client I’m travelling to, I might need to rent a car and drive for a bit. This is where my organization-a-la-webapps gets even more high tech. While driving, I usually like to plan out my day and think about things I might need to do that don’t fall under the category of “tasks for work,” such as buying groceries, paying bills, or making personal phone calls. Before you imagine me holding the steering wheel with one hand and my laptop/Blackberry with another, however, let me tell you about a service called Jott. The basic gist of Jott is that it’s a voice-to-text service that allows you to email yourself (or others) using nothing but a phone. The other fantastic thing about Jott is that it works with a variety of third-party services, notable Sandy and Twitter (more on these later).

While driving, I’d activate my bluetooth headset, and use the voice-activated dialing to “Call Jott.” Once the number dials, and I hear the familiar “Who do you want to Jott?” prompt, I would say something like “myself” and wait for the beep. Then I would say something like “remember to buy allergy medicine this evening” and after Jott’s magic elves decode my voice to text, I would get an email that had my voice transcription in it. It’ pretty neat stuff, but it’s still very new, so it has its quirks. I once used Jott to transcribe a grocery list to myself on the way to the store, but the transcription process took so long that didn’t get the email until after I was in the checkout line (needless to say I forgot a few things). Most of the time, however, it works pretty quickly. It’s nice to be able to email myself, but when it comes to todo’s and reminders, I take it a step further with a fantastic new service called Sandy .

Sandy is my personal assistant…sorta. It’s an online service that allows me to send myself reminders at specific times, schedule appointments, make todo lists, and remember details about people, places, and things. This is all facilitated via a virtual secretary of sorts named Sandy. I interact with Sandy by sending “her” an email (or using Jott, an SMS text message, or a Tweet from Twitter; more on Twitter later) with a few basic keywords such as “remind me to do my laundry at 9pm tomorrow” or “remember that the car is parked in the south lot” and when the time is right, Sandy will send me an email reminder, if appropriate, to take care of business.

I can also store and organize any data I want using Sandy by using tags; all I have to do is prepend an “@” symbol in front of a tag. For example, I have an @ideas tag that I use to store random product and/or invention ideas I think up every now and then. I’ll send Sandy an email with something “remember portable fuel-cell powered jetpack @ideas.” I can then send a “lookup @ideas” message and Sandy emails me back a list of my latest crazy ideas. It’s a fantastic service, and while they’re still in beta (there are a few tweaks that need to be made still), I highly recommend it. The fact that I can contact Sandy from so many mediums makes it that much more valuable. Also, the overall interaction experience with Sandy is a lot of fun: the designers make it feel like you’re actually interacting with a person.

Calling it a night

While on client sites, I stay in a variety of hotels. After checking in to my hotel at night, I like to unwind a bit and maybe do a little websurfing while listening to some music from Pandora or my home Ampache library (while neither of these function as cloud services, I figure I mention them anyways. I’m hoping that Pandora will soon open up to more devices). When living in hotels 80% of your week, it’s harder to stay social. That’s why I use applications like Facebook (which needs no explanation, I’m sure) and Twitter to stay in touch with friends.

Twitter is an odd phenomenon. It’s a service that allows you to “microblog” your life by posting short 140-character-or-less messages (called “tweets”) to the Twitter website. These short messages are meant to answer the question, “what are you doing?” and not only appear on your personal Twitter page, but can be sent instantaneously to friends of yours who “follow” you on Twitter.

Most people who don’t use Twitter fail to understand it, and in most cases, assume it to be useless and even silly. I know I was in that boat: when I first heard about it, I thought to myself, “this sounds totally obnoxious.” Why would I want to know what my friends are doing all of the time? As much as I love ‘em, I know them well enough to imagine my feed being polluted with such messages as “climbing stairs,” “eating a sandwich,” or even “pooping.” Do I really need to know all of these aspects of people’s lives? More importantly, do they really need to know mine?

The truth is, while Twitter can easily be misused for spamming mundane details about one’s life, most Twitter users don’t do that (unless in jest, of course). It’s become increasingly useful as an asynchronous conversation platform, since all you have to do to “reply” (in quotes, as you can “reply” to someone without actually replying to a specific message) to someone’s messages publicly is throw in an @ in front of their username (for example, to send me a “reply” just send a message to @Aashay on Twitter). These “replies,” or “at messages” as some people call them, are publicly viewable, and often spawn conversations between groups of people. While I rarely use them, Twitter also offers “direct” (private) messages.

Certain people who are “popular” on Twitter (meaning they have a lot of followers) such as web celebrities like Kevin Rose and popular bloggers like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch have tens of thousands of followers. Why? Because they often have useful, interesting, or important things to say. Bloggers especially can use Twitter to their advantage as it lets them push breaking news to thousands of people before anybody else gets to it. The recent deadly earthquakes in China, for example, were reported by people in China using Twitter long before CNN reported them.

I personally use Twitter to keep in touch with a handful of Bay Area friends, but I also use it to publish information about what flights I’m taking when I fly around. It’s a safety thing, in a way; in case any news breaks of plane mishaps (let’s hope there won’t be any), people who care can stay informed. Twitter is also terribly addicting once you and a small group of friends start using it. The most common use of Twitter is using it on mobile devices, whether through SMS messages or clients (I use one called TwitterBerry). It makes tweeting on the go practical and useful. People have even organized entire impromptu parties by using Twitter from their mobile devices!

Will that be all, sir?

One final service I’ve been using that deserves a mention, but doesn’t fit in a specific “timeslot” during my day, is Dropbox. It’s still in private beta, so you might not get a chance to use it for a while, but I can at least share my experiences with it. Dropbox describes itself as a solution for “secure backup, sync and sharing made easy” and those three reasons are exactly why I use it. It backs up my files, allows me to store one persistant version of each one across multiple computers (for example, I can make a change to a Visio document on my laptop, and any other PCs or Macs I have my Dropbox account linked to automatically see those changes), and makes it easy to share certain files with friends. They’ve also got a slick web interface and they make it easy to “roll back” to previous versions of your files. Dropbox is still in development, so I can only assume they’ll be adding more features later.

Store it in the cloud and go to bed already

I’m always on the hunt for new, useful web applications to improve my productivity and lifestyle. Desktop apps are great, but being constrained to a single computer is no longer acceptable in the world I live in. Web applications offer much more in terms of letting me access my data anywhere and letting me do a lot more with it. While some of the apps I mentioned might sound confusing, useless, or overkill at first, I encourage you to explore them and see if they improve your lifestyle even the least bit. I think, with the right mix of patience and the will to learn new things, you just might find something new, useful, and fun to use.



Thanks to Jevon Wild, Russell Dare, and David “Skipper” Everling for reading drafts of this post.