Isn't this the exact opposite of our favorite over-hyped buzzword: "The Cloud"? Instead of accessing all your data via freemium 3rd party hosts, you keep your own data, and those 3rd parties pubsub to/from your server. I like this idea since it's an elegant solution to our current web mess of walled gardens, multiple accounts, vendor lock-in, privacy, and the low quality of content on the web in general.
But I think we're 10 years away from having this because the hardware just isn't there yet. The idea will have traction when our cell phones can run as this "universal personal server". Then it can actually have the mass-scale adoption required for it to work. But the majority of end-users can barely operate an OS, they don't even know what the difference is between a browser and an app, and almost nobody understands what the Internet actually is. From the common point of view, the Internet might as well represent the highest achievement of magick rather than science. So until it's as ubiquitous as having a cell phone, personal servers will remain in the domain of geeks who will hack up, tweak and preen their own solutions.
It's interesting how the software industry is utterly craptastic at anticipating how the plummeting cost of better and better hardware changes the kind of software services which people will use. In short time spans too. Amazon, Google et. al. have spent billions going long on the bet that 12 years out, everything will be served from global super-computer clusters distributed across mega-datacenters around the world. It is interesting to ask if Amazon, Google and everyone else are about to get blind sided, and not only miss the boat, but fail to even see it.
But I think we're 10 years away from having this because the hardware just isn't there yet. The idea will have traction when our cell phones can run as this "universal personal server". Then it can actually have the mass-scale adoption required for it to work. But the majority of end-users can barely operate an OS, they don't even know what the difference is between a browser and an app, and almost nobody understands what the Internet actually is. From the common point of view, the Internet might as well represent the highest achievement of magick rather than science. So until it's as ubiquitous as having a cell phone, personal servers will remain in the domain of geeks who will hack up, tweak and preen their own solutions.
It's interesting how the software industry is utterly craptastic at anticipating how the plummeting cost of better and better hardware changes the kind of software services which people will use. In short time spans too. Amazon, Google et. al. have spent billions going long on the bet that 12 years out, everything will be served from global super-computer clusters distributed across mega-datacenters around the world. It is interesting to ask if Amazon, Google and everyone else are about to get blind sided, and not only miss the boat, but fail to even see it.