I've spoken about my personal cloud - my corner of the internet, reachable and usable from anywhere at any time. I've thought on it long and hard, and I think it's the right way to go. I should not be sitting at my office thinking to myself, "Gosh, I wish I had my personal laptop with me so I could look at this bookmark I have instead of having to track it down all over again."

And should it really be this hard to keep my calendar up to date? Remembering everything until I get home and updating things there and hoping not to double book myself, which is an inevitability for me.

And then there are tags - this wonderful new way of making my cloud searchable. It's the way of the future and you'll start seeing more of that here, too. Sure, they apply to bookmarks, but why not everything else? Why not email?

Google has really embraced a lot of this and has created a great set of tools accordingly. But even these tools have their failings and drawbacks.

First question. Is it better to stick with a unified solution, such as Google, rather than picking and choosing tools that might be a better fit but require more work to integrate? That's a hard question for me to answer right now.

Second question. Can device independence negatively impact the user experience? My answer is yes. By now anyone who knows me knows I am a happy Mac user and I love the core set of utilities provided. Unlike many of my friends, I do use Apple's Mail.app for my email rather than Thunderbird. I do use iCal and Address Book. I do not use Safari because I do not like its rendering engine, but that's another post. The point here is that I enjoy using client-side tools, and I don't feel good about abandoning that. I prefer to maintain local copies of my data and, when possible, manipulating that data locally when possible.

What happens if a server is down for maintenance, or for some outage. What happens if my internet connection is down. What happens if Google experiences data loss. We can reduce this to one big question - what happens when I give up control.

So I appeal to anyone who has read this far along. Have you chosen to trust Google with your personal data? What were your other choices, and how did you come to terms with such a massive change?