The year I succeeded at moving firmly into the cloud. I hesitated-- like Star Wars, would a corporate Emperor arrive in my cloud city to tax my data at an arbitrary and unpleasant price? I use online services, but I don't like common trends in terms of service, with Facebook perhaps having the worst.

But this year my digital life tipped. I became a bit more aggressive with always-on Internet. With the full flowering of the iPhone platform that we've seen in the past 18-months, I came to always have _some_ device. But there's also the netbook, the XBox 360 and Wii... The notebooks, netbooks, and iPod Touches of family members. The devices at work.

I also started working in more diverse locations. Office. Home. Lands far and foreign. It seems counter-intuitive given the contraction in the global economy, but more were moving about more frequently for work.

The end result became that having a service or document tied to one device was increasingly unworkable. I'd constantly wind up with some spare time, 15 minutes can be crazy productive, but not have the right data or application. And I couldn't carry everything all the time, although I flirted with thicker iPods, pocketfuls of thumb drives, and heavier briefcases.

But in the end I decided to lighten my briefcase, empty my pockets, and move into the cloud.

This is what I've succeeded in moving to the cloud, which is to say that each of these offers me a benefit by being cloudy:

• Email: Gmail. Loved it for years, the first cloud system I adopted, I can check my email anywhere at any time. It also helps that the gmail client, particularly its use of labels instead of folders, beats the pants off of any os-dependent client I've used. It's the ultimate in portability: your email in any connected browser.
• Personal web services: I've been using Drupal since late 2005. I've spun a bunch of my own web services from this, including a personal intranet that I can email items to; subjects become titles and email text become the story. This lets me easily clip and send all kinds of info to myself. Admittedly, not a cakewalk to install and configure, but it's something like Google notebook hopped up.
• Collaboration: Google docs does everything for me here. Work documents and spreadsheets with easy access control. I still use Office to create final document drafts and more complex documents, but Google Documents rocks when you've got multiple people. For an example of ubiquity, several projects use Google spreadsheets simply to track attendance-- if you're out sick, dial up the doc and mark the day out and then have some soup and sleep.
• Backup: This is where I really started moving into the cloud as a purpose. I try to practice a sound backup regimen. This included wireless network backup locally at home and then swapping disks with a relative. It was tedious, Apple kept %^&@ with the Airport Extreme firmware, and I had no guarantee that my elderly relative wasn't banging the disks about at his house. I settled on Backblaze (Mozy too expensive, Carbonite doesn't do external drives) and am very happy. I still do some local backup via Mac TimeMachine, but it's not exactly required.
• File storage: Backup is like insurance, it functions best when easy, inexpensive, and unneeded. But I work on a variety of devices in a variety of locations. I was getting sick of carrying a pocket full of thumb drives about. Dropbox saved me. I think the free tier is really awesome, but wound up springing for a 50gb paid account. I've configured my "Documents" folder on several machines to be my Dropbox folder. Now when I move from deck to deck, I've got my files there. 50gb is enough room, but just small enough to care to prune it. This is actually forcing me to think more clearly about my file archive, which Backblaze is faithfully archiving. Also, Dropbox has an iPhone app that is phenomenal, just Google for a review.
• Calendars: gCal. This was the last move, prompted finally by the need to sync calendars with a computer literate spouse. gCal, iCal with calDAV, and iPhone with Saisuke are the tools that allow calendars to be shared across locations and devices and among family members. Update Jan 6 '10: Unfortunately Saisuke turned out to be a bit under par-- slow, sometimes erratic, and once crashing and forcing an iPhone reboot. I went back to Apple's native iPhone app, along with Google Sync and it's passed the initial tests. Saisuke still has a better presentation on the monthly view-- events are shown far more clearly-- but that benefit just isn't enough for me. At an expensive ~$10 for Saisuke, I apologize for having recommended it.
• Content: Given other posts on this site, I'm clearly bullish on this aspect. But I resisted making it the first item here and will try to keep it practical. Of course, newspapers on iPhone and everywhere. But not just RSS aggregation, although there's great stuff like The Economist chart of the day. I also have some major subscription services. In August I picked up Safari Books Online from O'Reilly-- a fantastic way to consume technical material, it's recent website update is an improvement, and reprint corrections and new editions are just a search away. In December I started with Marvel Comics online, and I am loving that too-- easily search on contributors and characters, and you don't have to worry about missing an issue in an arc again. Outside of content-formerly-trapped-in-print, Lynda.com for training videos, as well as the wide wealth of indie training video that seems to daily improve in production values. Lots of TV on the web now too-- we stream Hulu in our living room, and iTunes HD throughout the house on devices big and small.
• Professional presence: This has been cloudy for years and years now, but it bears mention. LinkedIn has dominated my resume presentation for so long that even a few years ago submitting paper resumes for a post seemed anachronistic-- I still do scheduled reviews of my professional progress, but the updates go onto LinkedIn published live instead of to a Word file doled out only for job applications. As a result more potential collaborators contact me, and I them. Social networking and professional presence go hand in hand for years as well-- the integration of conferences and Twitter helps keep conversations going for months. I almost always prefer the tweets of those I followed after meeting at a conference or entrepreneurial weekend.

In general I am computing across a home server (Mac), Mac Books, an Eee PC netbook, an iPhone, and a work-provided Dell desktop. The above helps me keep organized across those devices and locations without having to think about it too much. This includes a calendar, working files, collaborated files, and a fair bit of entertainment media for the commutes.

Every new service I adopt can be a hassle. One has to read fine print on both the legal privacy side and also the technical compatibility side. But if you find the right services, you can eliminate a lot of hassle. I used to have to remember to copy my calendar from phone to desktop, both at work and at home, and also to make sure I copied it for my spouse. Now its all synched, from gCal in a browser to iCal on a Mac desktop to Saisuke on an iPhone.