Dave Winer tweeted something today that got me thinking, so instead of tweeting back and forth with him about it I thought I’d jot my thoughts here. Twitter is pretty horrible for discussions.
In response I pointed out that Dropbox and iCloud are different because Dropbox is a file syncing service and iCloud goes beyond that. If you’re a Mac or iOS developer you can sync portions of files to iCloud along with your application settings. Apple created this as an extension of their ecosystem. As a developer you can have automagic syncing for your applications, if you choose.
Of course I misunderstood Dave’s point. His concern is lock in.
Ah, now I see what he’s referring to. Apple has created a walled garden for applications built on their platform. It’s absolutely true. Another concern of Dave’s is the inability of iCloud to share your files outside of applications.
Once again, Dave is absolutely correct. There is no way to get at your content in iCloud if you’re not using an app that implements iCloud API’s. Oh, there is support for Windows, did you know that?
Here’s the deal. With iCloud Apple allows you to open your document, stored in iCloud, in your local application, make changes, and those changes can/will be sync’d back to your other devices. Here’s the difference as I see it. Dropbox is an extension of the filesystem on my local computer, iCloud is an extension of my application. Subtle, yes.
I’m having a difficult time getting to the difference because it is so subtle. Imagine if you have a Pages document open on your Mac and on your iOS device. You’re making changes on the Mac and you walk away. Those changes will get pushed to your iOS devices without saving the document. As far as I know you cannot do this with Dropbox. Dropbox will sync an entire file, not portions of a file.
Minor difference, but a difference none the less.
How about this. Dropbox allows me to see all my content via the web and my local filesystem has a copy of the documents. It’s absolutely perfect in that way. What about editing? Can you go to Dropbox.com, log in, and edit a binary Visio drawing? No, you cannot. With iCloud we get this feature via apps. Again, it’s avery subtle difference, but it’s something Apple is very fond of.
I’d imagine once Apple can solve these types of issues we’ll see a more open iCloud, until then, if you’d like a great file syncing solution Dropbox is a better choice than iCloud. If you’re after great integration iCloud may be your best bet, although some applications have done a great job using Dropbox as their syncing solution.
In the end syncing of files across multiple computers is a very difficult problem to solve and Apple is just beginning to address the problem. Dropbox has created a very elegant full file syncing solution. Both are useful.
Oh, one more question. I almost forgot to ask this. If Apples’ iCloud is a lock in, which I will not argue, how is being tied to Dropbox not lock in? I would consider it lock in. To me what’s freed us from lock in are open protocols, like HTML, or RSS. They are part of the fabric of the internet and completely open. I can modify HTML with any application that can read, write, and modify simple text. Definitely no lock in. If Dropbox created an open protocol for syncing of files, that could be implemented by anyone, and their client application, as well as anyone else’s, could communicate with any server that implemented that protocol, I’d say it wasn’t lock in.
A stretch? Maybe. But we are, after all, talking about subtle differences.
First we need an open standard for centralized RSS (man, that sounds wrong.) This way people writing tools can push and pull data to and from a service. I’ll bet Digg and Feedly have their own implementations of such a thing, that are nothing alike, but do what they need. Pulling together the feeds is the easy part, that’s been solved. It’s the availability on all devices and sync that’s a bit more difficult. That’s where the standard, or open, format or API, comes in. Sure, we have the browser, but it’s not exactly all that useful on all platforms. I’d like to host my own RSS aggregator service, on my hardware, and have the ability to tell that service I’ve read something and make sure the last item is bookmarked so I can pickup where I left off, possibly on another device. Yeah, I want the ability to use 
Most of the links I tap, or click on, these days originate on Twitter. What Dave has always been a proponent of is an RSS feed in the style of Twitter. In fact I’m pretty certain