Just take the internet away from me for a couple of hours and there’s this strange feeling that makes me feel crippled. The internet has become more important to me than what I use to access it. The speeds at which servers are constantly working to deliver content is the reason it has become such an indispensable tool for most computer users in today’s age. For me, the web is a filing cabinet, locker, record book, expense manager, timekeeper, study text, newspaper and most importantly, a communication medium that I just can’t afford to lose.

Most people feel scared storing any personal data on the web since they are not sure where it might end up, as they feel that there’s a complete lack of security and privacy. But in my experience, if there’s one place I can back all my files up and still find them after a year, it’s my trusty web space. How is that? In my smart attempts to learn by practice, I’ve (su)done stupid things that made me lose a lot of important documents and other files that I was working with. Yes I did achieve what I wanted to by doing these things but I’ve wasted a lot of time reversing these mistakes I’ve made. But what’s good is that I’ve only had to push a few import and sync buttons during most of the restore process. A few years back, when I didn’t use services like Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs, GMail IMAP and Dropbox, things would have been such a mess and I would have had to start working with a fresh slate. And since these services do exist now, I try to make full use of them as they have made things really easy for me.

But people tell me to sacrifice this convenience asking me to stop using these services because of their closed nature. They have reasons to believe that the companies that support closed-source apps maintain databases storing their users’ information. They think these databases are responsible for getting good people into trouble, despite them companies promising not to sell any of this information. Should I or should I not feel safe after reading their ever-changing privacy policies? Even when code is open source, you can never really be sure that it’s the same everywhere it’s hosted. Why, then, do I continue using web apps and connect them to client applications? Ideally, I should be running a server from home and I should use only the services I can host on it myself. But that’s such an asinine idea because in an ideal world, my house should be my work place, my vegetable farm, tea plantation and hundred other things that are not feasible. The reason I’m so dependent on the internet is not because of what it has made possible for me, but because of how convenient it is for me to do all those things here. It’s so easy to carry a small device like a phone or portable audio player that also automatically syncs my calendar, contacts, mail and other important dynamic information that I use on a daily basis. If I was expected to file all this manually in the right paper files in a proper filing cabinet, I wouldn’t have done it at all. If web apps make any other monotonous jobs like this easier, I don’t think I will ever blink an eye before I dive in and become comfortable in their waters.

In my opinion, closed source development gets done much faster because even though you’re writing code for others to use, you make the decisions yourself. You don’t always need to consult a hundred people before you change the UI design of your app; you’re free to work on community requests depending on how you prioritize the importance of their presence in your app. That’s probably one of the reasons so many Linux projects these days only aim to mimic their closed source competition. The only thing they have to say about their end result is that it’s open source, hence transparent, more secure and all the usual blah. Most of the web is nothing like that, and we’re using a good part of that web most of the time we stay online. I think it’s time to stop discussing what’s good and what’s bad about the web just by looking at whether it’s code is open or not. After all, we don’t start to trust the friends we make only if we know that they feel comfortable sharing their PayPal passwords with us, do we?