Many of the new and exciting services offered to us by start-ups and established companies alike are, often times, dressed-up versions of things we could already do. Video-sharing, messaging, chat and social networks take old and geeky technologies and polish them up for ease-of-use.

Live Mesh, MobileMe and Dropbox are but some examples (and all quite new). I have been excitedly using Dropbox for a bit right now and I know that it is mostly WebDAV, complete with version control¹ and a simple-to-use interface. Even if the underlying technology may be different (e.g. rsync) the end result is all the same, and this is technology we have had available for us for a long time, though clearly underutilised.

However, the need for and adoption of these kinds of tools hint at how unfriendly our existing solutions are for mass-use. Again, form is function, and it helps sell these products. All that is excellent, really, since unused technology is a sad state to be in. My only worry is that, while WebDAV is more or less a kind of standard, these new tools do their own thing, in their own way, and keep fragmenting the ways in which we use technology in general. I try to avoid depending on many of the things that I cannot easily control, and while playing with tech is fun, I would rather take my time and wait for a solution to really mature before jumping ‘all-in’.

I am somewhere between Scoble and Enterprise.

1. Arguably, it could be just a version control system and nothing more, but the way you use it feels very much like WebDAV to me [↩]