Did Google just pulled the plug on cloud computing, or the Wave only?

Google recently dropped Wave, its revolutionary collaboration platform I wrote about last year. The general reaction is a surprise, firstly because the Wave was very innovative, though not well packaged, secondly because no longer than a few months ago Google was actively promoting Wave to business partners on the Google IO 2010. And now, they are just stopping the service, just like that. Ok, it’s not the first product they closed, but this time the ecosystem is bigger, and the consequences are higher. And an important question arise – how dependable cloud computing really is?

Google’s plan for Wave was to create an ecosystem where independent servers running Wave could interact with each other, much like email servers. But like with email, the majority of users operated on the main Google server, much like the majority of emails are on GMail, HotMail and Yahoo. So now imagine they announce pulling a plug on GMail. That is pretty much what current users have with the Wave, and a bit of anxiety of how to export their data. (despite Google announcing it would be possible, the Wave data format loses a lot of its collaboration value outside of the platform)

Following the analogy scheme, imagine Twitter pulling the plug on their API, and the surprise reaction of all the developers and companies that built their existence around it. That’s pretty much what the current business ecosystem of Google Wave is feeling. I wonder what is Novell and its Pulse going to do right now, they seemed to be pretty into Wave integration. I guess a year’s worth of work will be abandoned.

Ok, but that’s just Google Wave, not many people used it (which was the company’s reason for pulling the plug anyway, however I feel it’s not the true reason, just the PR statement). While true, it makes an alarming precedence, and actually kills the idea of cloud computing for me.

Because, you see, the core of cloud computing idea is built upon an idealistic assumption that the service in the cloud will be reliable until the end of time. It’s advertised as a holy grail, that your data will be safe online, it will be cheap and will fulfill your needs. I actually liked it, I was planning to built my work around Google Apps etc., keep everything online and do work. However now I see that you simply have to have your own server, with full control on its whereabouts. Otherwise it’s like building castles on sands. No control whatsoever.

The current most popular “cloud computing” is in fact email. But since it comes from the beginning of the internet, it actually is very independent, even if kept and accessed completely online, like GMail. You can easily download your inbox, you can easily keep a copy of you inbox (IMAP) and finally you can even pull everything from your inbox as it arrives (POP). And if you have your own domain name, you can even change email providers without changing your address.

Expanding this thought, seems like the whole Web 2.0 arrives to a point where, overwhelmed by the new APIs and protocols, we forgot to make things solid. Web 1.0 was decentralized to be prepared for the nuclear war. Web 2.0 got centralized in the HQs of big players like Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, WordPress and eventually Microsoft. What is Web 3.0 going to be? If it’s going to be cloud computing, I’m not riding that one. I go straight to Web 4.0, which I hope to be the semantically-aware web. You know, where a machine code can understand irony in a given sentence. And the sentiment analysis isn’t fooled by pairing “awesome” with “failure”. I’ll be waiting for you, right there.