It’s been some weeks now, since I really got into last.fm – I think it was around the time I installed all the airtunes stuff (by the way: just found amua which is an alternative player for last.fm – it’s a kind of proxy for the last.fm webservice and uses itunes for playback which means, that now last.fm streams to airtunes through the whole flat 😉 ) . It’s great to have your personal music profile there, always automatically being served with new stuff you like. Today i stumbled upon an article on Nicholas Carr’s blog (via Robert), which deals with the idea of Apple and Google merging their core competences: Apple building new slick „alwyas-online“ devices, and Google being responsible for the web back-end. And Eric Schmidt being on the board of Apple this indeed could be a real thing going on at this time. The major point behind it is having all your data on the web, always accessible via some device. This of course has major security an performance issues, but Google with their super-computers could be the one dealing with it (in fact in some ways they already do with their office- and email apps they are offering.) And I really like the idea – in fact this is already happening with services like last.fm: as long as I’m online, and I am actually the whole day in office and with WLAN at home, I have the last.fm player playing my music – basically no need for an itunes library anymore though I need it for syncing the ipod – you get the point. Having data centralized and always available could be the future of personal computing – the main thread will be, as noted, availability, security and performance. This is why I believe in p2p based structures in the future. Let all your devices be able to share their small amount of hard-space they have and you build the scaling, resistant and perfect performing backend for the future. It’s failsafe, even if certain structures are down. This is the centralized model, Google and Apple might build, decentralized. For that one thing seems to come clear: availability and bandwith will be the currency of tomorrow: „if you’ve got bandwith you can share with me, I’m willing to „pay“ (say „give“) you something. For that „currency“ I’m giving you, you are able to get other things like a movie-download or three songs on itunes. It’s so much fun digging into this, cause it’s going to change the game, and with a very very small part, we take place in it… 😉