Found a cool app that fills a need that’s been around forever. Quassel is a distributed IRC client– it consists of both a core running on some server somewhere that actually connects to IRC servers and clients that connect to the core. The core is connected even when no clients are, so you can toss a core on a shell somewhere and connect to it at will, but your client looks connected all the time.

Quassel does a few things right– it’s a “cloud” service, but without the need to put all your eggs in one basket. It works well, it’s light-weight, and does just one thing. The fact that you control both the cloud component and the local component means it will keep Stallman happy when he says “keep your data at home”.

It sucks at a few things, too, though. The worst thing is that is an application, not a platform. You are stuck using the Quassel client, which blows. It’s not much worse than any other horrible OS X IRC client, but it is bad. It is open source so maybe one could improve the client, but it should be useable with any local IRC client instead. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

This is one direction I would love to see “cloud computing” go. Connected components, some in the cloud and some at home, but all of them under your control. I’m willing to give my data to Google when it is the most convenient thing to do, but I would sure as hell prefer not to given any alternative.

p.s. Can we call it anything but “cloud computing”? Talking about technology in the “cloud” makes me feel like this guy: