It’s been a while again, but I’ve been trying new things- Recently, I’ve gotten into Cloud Computing. For those of you who have no clue to what this means, it’s similar to owning a webserver and running your data from there- Webmail, like GMail, online documents such as Zoho or GoogleDocs are all decent examples of Cloud solutions, but the major flaw with services like these is that they run on someone else’s server. You have no control over how your data is stored and used- After all, you probably agreed to some terms of service that allow your Cloud provider to do whatever they want to your data without informing you or gaining consent. The best part of the story is, you probably agreed to allow them to change the agreement without warning.

For most, you probably don’t remember reading such an agreement, so we’ll just say that it was the long block of text that forced you to press the “I agree” button or circle. Who can understand all that legalese? Bad choice, you probably signed away your soul, life, and material possessions to someone else. While you can terminate these agreements, face it- How many of us can live without these online services? It’s probable that quite a large amount of people can, but at the same time, a large section of the tech-savvy internet and IT community can’t. However, there’s an alternative!

Tonido. A service that allows you to host your own Cloud server. Tonido is available for Windows, Macs, and Linux distros that use the debian package manager. By default, Tonido will offer the ability to use multiple user accounts as well as access any folder on your hard drive for sharing. It has a music player, photo viewer, websharing manager, a notepad/blogging application and a workspace/calendar app. Tonido also has a email-like system for usage with other Tonido users, sending them messages to their @tonidoid.com account. Other than that, one of the most valuable features may have to be the “Groups” feature. Using Tonido, you can set up networks of multiple users using different machines (running Tonido on them, that is) and share information, music, notes and files. It is a great platform for collaboration, making projects easier while at the same time keeping things private. Tonido can be accessed from any device with a web browser, allowing it to be accessed from remote locations (like school), or from an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Somethings, of course, are too good to be true. Tonido lacks many features, such as email to other domains/users outside of the Tonido network. It lacks applications to edit documents and images, and manage files. For someone looking for that kind of Cloud computing, EyeOS offers such ability in an web based format for hosting on any server. The upside, however, is that Tonido is still a new platform, licensed under the GPL and commercial licenses, and the best part? You use C++ to write programs for it. I have no doubt that an office suite, as well as image editting and similar options will appear in Tonido in the future, but for now, we wait.

Tonido, as it is, is an excellent alternative to other services out there. The one feature that I do wish that it had was the ability to upload files onto the computer. While it is a great application to use at home, it is far from being suitable for usage on a dedicated server elsewhere. Speaking of which, here’s the link.