As anyone who has had to reinstall their system several times in the span of a couple of months knows, like I’ve recently had to do, reconfiguring their apps every time gets to be a real pain.
A subtle update that was made to Microsoft’s Live Messenger a few versions ago which I’ve really come to love and appreciate is how it now stores nicknames and my avatar online. So all I have to do is log in, no matter the computer, and all my settings just show up.
I believe one of the first steps toward cloud computing becoming as ubiquitous as some are hoping is to move offline app settings online. Imagine getting on anyone’s computer, firing up an app, logging in with OpenID and blamo, there’s your custom configuration on someone else’s machine. Log out, and it’s gone.
Yeah, it might not be as sexy as Docs or Bespin, but it would be freakin’ useful.
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