Virtual Permanent Address

Today I launched my first blog on blogger.com. In fact I launched two blogs; one in Arabic  talks mainly about finance and investment - my speciality - and this blog in English where I'm planning to throw some crazy ideas about the future of technology and how much it will penetrate our daily lives.

I also was lucky to snap my dream domain names last week "dajani.co" when these domains became publicly available. In the same month (July 2010) I joined Gmail after over 5 years with Yahoo! which came after 6 years with Hotmail (since 1999).

In the same month I started using the free services of Sugarsync, which seems acceptable so far despite the slow website.

All these online activities happening in my life forced me to set back and reflect on how much time of my day will be spent online. I started thinking of neo "the Matrix" when he totally forgot when did he see the sun last time.

Amazingly, lots of what we have seen as kids and teenagers in the 80s-90s started to be a reality. Cisco's Telepresence for example is a real - though virtual real - example of Star Trek Teleporting.

What I'm starting to face and to really lose a bit of control is to keep a track of all my online activities, the email addresses, the forums, the blogs, the favorite news sites, ...etc. In addition to the pain of having to fill again and again the same bio data in each website you actually visited for a single information and have no interest in joining it, but you have to do it so you can see what you came for.

Most important of all is the risk of having your personal data scattered all over the syberspace!

So the idea that has been hitting my head over and over again for months is: Why isn't there a single Website, Application or Operating System, that you log-in to it once and there you go, all your online issues are in one place.

This THING! could have a virtual form (i.e. web site) that you can access from any device, plus an application form which you can download and set-up in any computer, smartphone...etc., and finally, it can be as an Operating System (I believe this is the idea of Chromium OS), which - when turned on - can work only with Internet connection and each and every thing you write is stored online.

The first issue as I mentioned above is the security issue, because having all your documents, email addresses, user IDs, Passwords, blogs, BANK ACCOUNTS & CREDIT CARD data in one place is on one hand a neat and convenient thing, while on the other hand it's a devastating thing if someone -somehow- got your main password.

Therefore, first the companies planning to develop such websites or applications should take huge care of security protection, second, if we want the application to generate a single Universal Virtual ID "what I call it UVID" then there should be authentication of each and every person using the service, meaning there should be formal application and verification of the user's actual ID before issuing his/her UVID.

Finally, after the user sets up his/her page including a dashboard for all services included, he/she can join other web-based email providers, forums, websites, purchase online, providing only his/her UVID and password, which is the most important password in his/her life and should change every minute using RSA-like technology.

I believe this way, we can move a lot of our personal photos, docs., finances ...etc. to be parked, backed-up online and be reachable from any device anywhere anytime and we can do a lot of our work online too. This is more that simple Cloud Computing.