The Vision For An Online File System

Just over two weeks ago, we launched a long-overdue redesign of Openomy. We think the impact of the design has been great and we're proud of what we accomplished -- knowing full well there's a tremendous amount of work still ahead.

We had one driving goal for this new design:

To execute on our expanded vision of becoming the place where your organize your web-based world.

From Centralized To Decentralized

When we first started, we thought the Online File System would be easy: provide the equivalent of a hard drive (online) for a user, and allow applications to store and retrieve files from that "hard drive" using open APIs (the "file system"). This was extremely innovative three years ago, when we started, but it still wasn't exactly right just yet.

As we've grown, we've realized this isn't the model of the web: just because something worked on the desktop, doesn't mean it works on the web. The models are very different; the former is a controlled, centralized space, while the latter is an uncontrolled, decentralized web of loosely connected parts.

To become the Online File System, we needed to look past the centralized "hard drive in the cloud." We had to think hard about how to capture the web's decentralized nature. It occurred to us that the important part of the model wasn't the storage itself, but the simple access to the data, both for the user as well as the developer.

Easy Organization Of Your Web Based World

Right now, we store our photos on Flickr and Facebook, our documents on Google Docs and Zoho, our videos on YouTube and Vimeo. This is the decentralized model of the web, and it works. What doesn't work, however, is easily aggregating and organizing all your different files together, in one place. I can't easily see the pictures of my trip to Vancouver in the same place I can see my videos. I have to remember what is where, and when they were put there. To make an analogy from the desktop model, there's no web-based "Windows Explorer."

Openomy's goal is to organize your web based world. We'll let you store your files where you see fit (Flickr, Facebook, Google Docs, etc) and we'll learn about those files automatically (using the remote services APIs). Once we know about those files, we'll make them searchable, taggable, and shareable. All your data, available in one place, easy to find, and easy to share (with a few friends or the world). And for files that have no other place, we still provide easy-to-use storage!

It's a future we're excited about, and we're eager to keep working towards this world.

Announcing the Openomy API v2.0

I'm very pleased to announce that today we're formally launching our new API (v2.0)! This is a huge step forward for Openomy, the developers using Openomy to develop applications, and the users of Openomy and participating applications.

The new API is much more "REST-compliant" (as opposed to our older, GETSful API) and should be much easier for developers to write applications against. It will also be much easier for us at Openomy to add features. We think our developers will greatly enjoy this new simplicity and ability to quickly iterate on your apps!

S3 Storage

Also with this launch, we're formally announcing that our default
storage engine is now Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). In addition to cutting costs, we believe using S3 will bring more peace of mind to our users and developers that their files are safe and secure in Amazon's data centers and will be highly available.

Achieving Our Vision

Launching both the new API as well as our new storage system completes a long process of rearchitecting our backend to allow us to grow more easily and iterate more quickly. The short-term benefits of this are quicker responses and higher uptime. The long-term benefits are allowing us to focus more closely on our vision of becoming the Online File System.

Over the past couple of years, as we predicted, the world is moving to an almost entirely web-based software model. We post our photos to Flickr, write our documents on Zoho, etc. Unfortunately, it's much too difficult for us to use our photos posted on Flickr within our documents on Zoho.

This is solved in the traditional desktop-based software model by the file system. Any application can access any file via a single API in the file system. There are (virtually) no data silos on the desktop. Any file is available for use by any application.

We're working to achieve this on the web. Our goal is to break down the data silos and allow applications to have access to all of a user's data. Moreover, we want the user to have full control over this. You deserve to be able to choose what applications have access to which data and have full data portability.

We believe this is the right model, and with these latest launches, you'll start to see this happening shortly!

P.S. Don't worry! The old APIs will stay on for a while, and we'll cover the deprecation process at a later time in another post.