According to news from the eyeos team, the new eyeos 2.0 operating system isn't just a revamp of the company's former product, it's something entirely new, built "from scratch," notes a company blog post. With a new UI (pictured below), new applications, and new concept for how the web-based desktop should work, the update is more than a fresh coat of paint.

Upon login, for example, instead of displaying a simulated computer desktop complete with icons and wallpaper, the updated OS features a new dock bar whose menus link you to applications, events, contacts, and more.

The other key part to eyeos 2.0 is the focus on collaboration. As with Google Docs, eyeos provides a web office component that allows you to invite friends to collaborate with you. As multiple users log in to edit the same file, colored lines display to highlight which sections are being edited by your colleagues or friends. You can also add comments and view the changes made by the other collaborators. At the moment, though, this "web office" feature appears to be limited to a word processor and calendar.

Other updates in eyeos 2.0 include real-time notifications via a new instant messaging component, a re-written file system and kernel, a new sync tool for syncing files, contacts, and calendar from your local desktop to the web, and new base applications which function as real apps as opposed to demos of what eyeos can do.

Why No Love for Webtops?

The main difference between what Google plans to offer with Chrome OS and what eyeos and other "webtops" like it is that Chrome OS doesn't live in a web browser, it makes the web browser the operating system. Even though Google's browser will sit on a Linux kernel, this won't be apparent to end users. The browser, for all intents and purposes, is the OS. And unlike eyeos, Google is making deals with netbook manufacturers to come preinstalled on their hardware. Eyeos, on the other hand, is still a destination you reach via URL (Well, for the most part.)

Despite the revamp, new look, and new features of eyeos 2.0, end users probably won't take note of this or any other webtop for that matter. As Ray Valdes, research director at Gartner Research, was quoted as saying a few months ago: "I have not seen growth or traction among the Webtop companies over the past year," Valdes said. "From a long-term perspective, I don't see any change to current market trends, which are that Webtop ventures are not gaining market traction."

But why are users so underwhelmed? For one thing, the web office components of any of these ventures are poor comparisons (if they exist at all) to what Google Docs provides. The poor webtops would be better off partnering with Zoho Docs instead, a feature-rich web office startup that could offer a real alternative to Google's online office. Webtop Ghost tries to make this transition easier by linking to both Google Docs and Zoho as opposed to offering their own applications, but they're more of an exception than a rule.

Additionally, there's more than a bit of hesitation among end users to make a full-on switch from a system they know - be that the OS on their local hard drive or Google's cloud-based programs - to some young startup that may up-and-disappear at any time, like the better known You OS did only last summer.

Finally, there are issues of lag time and speed. Web OS's that try to simulate the local desktop experience simply can't duplicate the feel of native applications. And when they try, they can often end up using a huge chunk of memory in the process.

Eyeos: But Wait, We're Not Just a Webtop, We're Software Too!

Although eyeos has to fight all the same issues facing webtops as described above, they have an identity issue too. It seems eyeos can't decide if they want to be a traditional webtop accessible via the eyeos.info URL or open source software you can install on your own server. This latter solution is designed for users worried about the "privacy and confidentiality problems" that come from hosting your data on a "big company's" server.

While the host-your-own option will appeal to a handful of do-it-yourselfer geeks out there, the majority of mainstream users - and even the majority of early adopters - aren't looking for a web OS you have to install on your own. If folks are that into privacy and open source, they'll just install Linux and manage their own backups instead. Besides, offering the host-your-own solution almost misses the point of being a web OS. The promise of cloud computing is that it's supposed to make our lives easier - our data lives on the web now and not on our fallible hard disks and CDs. We don't have to backup, because Google (or any other cloud vendor) does that for you. We don't have to worry with hard drive space either - we use the cloud, sometimes even for a fee, and we can get to our data from anywhere using any device. And all this is provided to you within your browser. Yes, it does mean that we give up a bit of our privacy in the process, but it's a trade that most are willing to make.

All this being said, the updates to eyeos 2.0 are a nice step forward for the fledging webtop and will appeal to those interested in that sort of thing...but, sadly, we're guessing that most of you aren't.

iPhone Users: Apple Knows What's Best For You

On the one hand, people acknowledge that a closed and tightly controlled platform has its benefits. Take the iPhone "kill switch," for example. Steve Jobs recently confirmed its existence, saying that it is necessary to have in case of a malicious program, like one that went after user's personal data, for example. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he says.

Yet Apple sees no problem pulling the lever that makes apps disappear from the App Store. As of today, they have already sucked several into the App Bermuda Triangle, including the notorious "I Am Rich App." Oh, but clearly, it's all done in our best interest, right? Apple is protecting us from ourselves? Surely, that Nullriver app that allowed for tethering our iPhones was a dangerous and malicious threat to our personal safety.

Gated Communities and The Ever-Changing TOS

But let's not just harp on Apple - they are by no means the only company with a kill switch. The disappearance of apps from MySpace and, more recently, Facebook, is a constant source of news. Of course, in most cases, their removal is due to a violation of the terms of service, but not always. Back in the day, MySpace was happily shutting down apps that competed with their own offerings, which led to the shutdown of apps from sites like Vidlife, Stickam, Revver, Photobucket, and Pyzam.

Then you have Facebook. Now that they have a healthy developer community, the company has decided to change the rules by which the developers must play. Where as before, apps were spread "virally" by incentivizing activity, now that is no more. In other words, developers will need to re-code their apps so they don't reward you for sharing the app with a friend by handing out virtual cash or unlocking more features for you.

While Facebook users that have been barraged by spammy app invites may embrace this change, the message to developers is clear: Facebook can, at any time, change the rules and put your app out of business.

Facebook is but one example, though. As Nick O'Neill recently noted, this same situation could apply to any cloud application - like those that run on Amazon's S3, for example. If Amazon deems an app to be malicious, they could just shut it down. "I think this is a riskier environment to run a business," says Nick.

But We're Safer, Right?

What do you get for giving up all this freedom and openness? Security and safety, of course. When things are locked down and tightly controlled, the benefit to the end user is security.

In fact, this idea that someone else, above and beyond the user, should have control over what's permitted to run on our machines, be them PCs or iPhones, is the driving force of change in today's new computing environment. To see what we mean, you have to read this interview with Jonathan Zittrain, cofounder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he discusses how the internet and computing as we've known it was just a historical accident. "Bill Gates never dreamed of controlling Windows applications [like this]," he says, when speaking of the shift to these controlled platforms of the future.

Progress?

This new, controlled environment we're discussing here isn't just affecting a handful of web sites and the iPhone - it's shaping up to be the entire future of the web, too. But where can you draw the line between what's good for everyone versus what's good for you? How do you feel about the fact that you are no longer trusted to know what's best? How OK are you with letting others lock things down for you?

Perhaps the biggest question, though, is whether or not the move to this homogenized, restricted web is progress? Or is it that we're giving up our own control and freedom at a dangerous cost?

The Cloudo IOS is a hosted service running on a server-side configuration called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). The communication between the server and client is obtained with AJAX and the data is stored in XML. XSL is used to transform the data to HTML to render the user interface. Javascript is used to handle event related tasks among other things.

Getting Started

To begin using Cloudo like any other web OS, you start by opening your web browser and visiting a web site where you can login. The login screen appears, much like a login screen on any desktop PC. You enter in your username and password and your online desktop appears.

Your desktop has icons for file folders and applications, much like you have on your own PC. There is also a start menu, where you can access other programs.

According to the Cloudo website, the Cloudo desktop offers a nice feature that lets you change its theme to resemble an OS you're more familiar with like Linux, Mac, or Windows.

File Syncing

Once logged into the web OS, the next step would be to copy files over to the Cloudo desktop. You can either do this manually, file-by-file, or use Cloudo's automatic sync feature to copy all your files. To copy a file manually, you connect to Cloudo's online computer from your desktop PC, and then you drag-and-drop your files or folders from your PC to the Cloudo drive.

Drag-and-Dropping Files

Alternately, you can configure the service to sync your files automatically to the Cloudo OS, but I could not currently test this feature to determine its true effectiveness.

Sharing & Collaboration

Any file or folder on the Cloudo OS can be shared easily. You just click on it and then click the "share" button. You then choose who you want to share the album with by clicking their image from a list of pre-configured contacts or by entering in their name.

Mobile Access

Cloudo also allows you to access the service from a mobile devices. As long as the device has an internet connection, you can access for files from your cell phone on the go. The website showed this being done over an iPhone connection, but stated that "any modern cellphone" would work.

Applications

The service comes loaded with some of the applications that you need, like a Paint application, a Word Processor, a Calendar, a Contact Manager, a Media Player, and some games. If you need more applications, there's an icon on the desktop, "Download Applications," where you can browse for more. Those applications will be either developed by Cloudo themselves, by 3rd party developers, or by users, using the developer tools included in Cloudo.

Applications you design yourself can be shared with either just your friends or with all Cloudo users. You can even offer the app as a "beta" initially. The development program is set up as a revenue sharing venture, so developers who produce applications for Cloudo can earn a profit from their efforts.

Conclusion

Not being a developer, I don't qualify to join the current alpha, but I was able to use the a login that allowed me to demo the OS. Unfortunately, the version I could access did not appear to be the same version as shown on the Cloudo website. I didn't see some of the things mentioned in the demo, like the link to download applications, the file sharing features, or the theme changer (I could only change the wallpaper).

That being said, Cloudo was very responsive, launching new items quickly and I liked how it had desktop widgets, just like my Vista PC has. The feel was very close to that of using a "real" desktop.

However, the applications that Cloudo currently offers are very limited. Only a basic word processor and paint program seem useful, but no other "productivity" apps (like an office suite) were present. Those would be must-haves in order to really use the IOS as a desktop alternative. You could get around not having that many apps on Cloudo if you had a web browser present, so you could visit Google Docs or ThinkFree, etc., but Cloudo did not have a browser built-in.

Of course, to use Cloudo, you are already using a browser, so I suppose you could just use your desktop's browser, but then what would be the point of using Cloudo at all, except for online storage or mobile access? Some integration between web apps and Cloudo would have been nice - for example, the ability to download online files to your Cloudo desktop.

But perhaps Cloudo's goal is to have the community build all the productivity apps you would need. With its inclusion of developer tools in the service, they certainly make it easy for anyone to contribute to the web OS's offerings. If this program takes off, the lack of apps will be a non-issue.

The web OS itself was well-designed and user-friendly, so I'll check back in with it when it launches to see if any improvements have been made that would make it more useful. You too, can sign up for the OS's launch, which is to be later on this year, from here.

Yet, even from a casual glance, it is clear that Amazon's work is very important. Since early last year, the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Amazon has been methodically exposing pieces of its own infrastructure as commodity web services, and in the process confusing Wall Street analysts and making thousands of startups quite happy.

Dr. Vogels has been both the architect and the evangelist of this effort. In his speech at last year's ETech conference he explained that by leveraging the Amazon Web Services Stack, web developers are finally able to focus on the core business logic of their apps and services. Hiding the enormous complexity of building a scalable web business behind a simple API, Amazon is paving the way toward a whole new web ballgame.

What Vogels talked about on his blog a few weeks back is not a public web service, but a piece of internal infrastructure, which allows Amazon to service millions of customers. The paper is a unique revelation about the inner workings of one of just a handful of Internet giants. It is also a preview of the web services to come in the next decade. In this post we take a close look at Dynamo, discuss where it fits and consider its implications.

Scalability Issues With Relational Databases

Before discussing Dynamo it is worth taking look back to understand its origins. One of the most powerful and useful technologies that has been powering the web since its early days is the relational database. Particularly, relational databases have been used a lot for retail sites where visitors are able to browse and search for products. Modern relational database are able to handle millions of products and service very large sites.

However, it is difficult to create redundancy and parallelism with relational databases, so they become a single point of failure. In particular, replication is not trivial. To understand why, consider the problem of having two database servers that need to have identical data. Having both servers for reading and writing data makes it difficult to synchronize changes. Having one master server and another slave is bad too, because the master has to take all the heat when users are writing information.

So as a relational database grows, it becomes a bottle neck and the point of failure for the entire system. As mega e-commerce sites grew over the past decade they became aware of this issue - adding more web servers does not help because it is the database that ends up being a problem.

Dynamo - A Distributed Storage System

Unlike a relational database, Dynamo is a distributed storage system. Like a relational database it is stores information to be retrieved, but it does not break the data into tables. Instead all objects are stored and looked up via a key. A simple way to think about such a system is in terms of URLs. When you navigate to the page on Amazon for the last Harry Potter book, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0545010225 you see a page that includes a description of the book, customer reviews, related books, and so on. To create this page, Amazon's infrastructure has to perform many database lookups, the most basic of which is to grab information about the book from its URL (or, more likely, from its ASIN - a unique code for each Amazon product, 0545010225 in this case).

In the figure above we show a concept schematic for how a distributed storage system works. The information is distributed around a ring of computers, each computer is identical. To ensure fault tolerance, in case a particular node breaks down, the data is made redundant, so each object is stored in the system multiple times.

In technical terms, Dynamo is called an eventually consistent storage system. The terminology may seem a bit odd, but as it turns out creating a distributed storage solution which is both responsive and consistent is a difficult problem. As you can tell from the diagram above, if one computer updates object A, these changes need to propagate to other machines. This is done using asynchronous communication, which is why the system is called "eventually consistent."

How Dynamo Works

The technical details in Vogels' paper are quite complex, but the way in which Dynamo works can be understood more simply. First, like Amazon S3, Dynamo offers a simple put and get interface. Each put requires the key, context and the object. The context is based on the object and is used by Dynamo for validating updates. Here is the high level description of Dynamo and a put request:

• Physical nodes are thought of as identical and organized into a ring.
• Virtual nodes are created by the system and mapped onto physical nodes, so that hardware can be swapped for maintenance and failure.
• The partitioning algorithm is one of the most complicated pieces of the system, it specifies which nodes will store a given object.
• The partitioning mechanism automatically scales as nodes enter and leave the system.
• Every object is asynchronously replicated to N nodes.
• The updates to the system occur asynchronously and may result in multiple copies of the object in the system with slightly different states.
• The discrepancies in the system are reconciled after a period of time, ensuring eventual consistency.
• Any node in the system can be issued a put or get request for any key.

So Dynamo is quite complex, but is also conceptually simple. It is inspired by the way things work in nature - based on self-organization and emergence. Each node is identical to other nodes, the nodes can come in and out of existence, and the data is automatically balanced around the ring - all of this makes Dynamo similar to an ant colony or beehive.

Finally, Dynamo's internals are implemented in Java. The choice is likely because, as we've written here, Java is an elegant programming language, which allows the appropriate level of object-orineted modeling. And yes, once again, it is fast enough!

Dynamo - The SLA In A Box

Perhaps the most stunning revelation about Dynamo is that it can be tuned using just a handful parameters to achieve different, technical goals that in turn support different business requirements. Dynamo is a storage service in the box driven by an SLA. Different applications at Amazon use different configurations of Dynamo depending on their tolerence to delays or data discrepancy. The paper lists these main uses of Dynamo:

Business logic specific reconciliation: This is a popular use case for Dynamo. Each data object is replicated across multiple nodes. The shopping cart service is a prime example of this category.
Timestamp based reconciliation: This case differs from the previous one only in the reconciliation mechanism. The service that maintains customers' session information is a good example of a service that uses this mode.
High performance read engine: While Dynamo is built to be an "always writeable" data store, a few services are tuning its quorum characteristics and using it as a high performance read engine. Services that maintain a product catalog and promotional items fit in this category.

Dynamo shows once again how disciplined and rare Amazon is at using and re-using its infrastructure. The technical management must have realized early on that the very survival of the business depended on common, bullet proof, flexible, and scalable software systems. Amazon succeeded in both implementing and spreading the infrastructure through the company. It truly earned the mandate to then leverage its internal pieces and offer them as web services.

How Does Dynamo Fit With AWS?

The short answer is that it does not, because it is not a public service. The short answer is also shortsighted because there are clear implications. First, is that since Amazon is committed to building a stack of web services, a version of Dynamo is likely to be available to the public at some time in the future.

Second, Amazon is restless in its innovation; and that applies to web services as well as it applies to its retail business. S3 has already made possible a whole new generation of startups and web services and Dynamo is likely to do the same when it comes out. And we know that more is likely to come, as even with Dynamo, the stack of web services is far from complete.

Finally, Amazon is showing openness - a highly valuable characteristic. Surely, Google and Microsoft have similar systems, but Amazon is putting them out in the open and turning its infrastructure into a business faster than its competitors. It is this openness that will allow Amazon to build trust and community around their Web Services stack. It is a powerful force, which is likely to win over developers and business people as well.

The Future - Amazon Web OS

To any computer scientist or software engineer to watch what Amazon is doing is both awesome and humbling. Taking complex theoretical concepts and algorithms, adopting them to business environments (down to the SLA!), proving that they work at the world's largest retail site, and then turning around and making them available to the rest of the world is nothing short of a tour-de-force. What Emre Sokullu called HaaS (Hardware as a Service) in his post yesterday is not only an innovative business strategy, but also a triumph of software engineering.

Amazon is on track to roll out more virtual web services, which will collectively amount to a web operating system. The building blocks that are already in place and the ones to come are going to be remixed to create new web applications that were simply not possible before. As we have written here recently, it is the libraries that make it possible to create giant systems with just a handful of engineers. Amazon's Web Services are going to make web-scale computing available to anyone. This is unimaginably powerful. This future is almost here, so we can begin thinking about it today. What kinds of things do you want to build with existing and coming Amazon Web Services?