My friend Jim wrote, regarding Google’s Chrome OS:

It’s an interesting idea – a distro where the only app is the browser – but it’s not really anything new; it’s just another iteration of the thin client idea. Of course, it might be the right iteration this time.

It also rather goes against a lot of the ideas people like Alec and Adriana are coming up with – ideas of owning one’s own data are rather scuppered by every application running on some anonymous server somewhere. Maybe, after a while, users of Chrome OS will start to buy UI-less home servers to run their apps on and store their data.

Maybe we need a UI-less distribution of Linux, running Apache (or whatever) and a whole bunch of open source webapps – word processing, spreadsheets – and, of course, a Mine! server.

…and I responded in the comments, but alas his homebrew blog software ate my formatting:

ideas of owning one’s own data are rather scuppered by every application running on some anonymous server somewhere

Unless it’s yours

I’m not worried by more and more browsers; I am watching my colleagues realise that all the blogs they have on blogs.sun.com are rather a single point of failure and that their continued publication is at the whim of Larry Ellison. Suddenly people are really really interested in the means of exporting and transporting their blog to another platform, which would not be an issue was the software under their control. I’ve had three people say they now understand why I’ve always been blogging elsewhere…

As a counterpoint, go browse “Opera Unite” which is really interesting; presented as a way for you to take back ownership your data, it is in fact a truly remarkable way for Opera to host (read: “cache and serve”) your data on the Web in a way that gives them a degree of control; as an Eminence Grise for the “empowered user” it would present an interesting attack on Google’s stranglehold of free services and cloud data.

All theMineProject seeks to do is go a step further and expunge the middleman.

a distro where the only app is the browser

Anyone here remember HotJava?

I like the idea of more browsers. The browser is the new end-user platform – anyone who’s not realised this yet has not been paying attention.

The important thing is to maintain diversity this time around, and not let a single vendor take 90% of the installed base.

Back in April, when Adriana and I visited the Bay area, we did a lunchtime talk about the Mine! project at Google. Here is the second part; apologies for the delay in posting it, there were more slides to sync audio against, in my half.