Something clicked for me today, when I got an email from Pogo Plug, a company that makes a physical virtual server. You plug it into a power outlet in your house, hook it up to wifi, and theoretically you have cloud storage. It was not a good idea, was not well executed. I bought one, tried to set it up, failed, and gave up. One day when I was cleaning house I just threw it in the garbage. I remember the moment.

Anyway, it was a crap product, but the email was more interesting. It said it was time to pay for the free storage I didn't know I had. If I didn't I'd be locked out of my data. That's what they said. They used that actual phrase. Locked out.

Now that's no different from Amazon. If I don't pay my S3 bill, my data goes poof. I don't think I can even pay to get it back. So miss one month and there goes everything I've been "building" on the web.

Fact is, nothing we have created so far is persistent. Archive.org is the closest, but I can't map a name to their storage. It's a useful back up but it's not the web.

The web is ephemeral as the memory in your computer. It's meant to go away. But we think of it as persistent. We are wrong to think of it that way.