Fundamentally, this is a very easy argument for me. Whom do you trust most?google or facebook? jolicloud uses your facebook login while ChromeOS uses your gmail login. Add to that the ability to log into your google apps account on ChromeOS.
Personally, I trust google. Here's why. I spent most of the day unliking artists that facebook had decided I wanted to keep up with. A little over a year ago I began to see items on my profile page turn into links. That was a sign of things to come. Now, when I check the list of people or things I like, some of the things come straight from my profile page. When I wrote that I was a fan of the Beatles, Outkast or Kanye, I never expected to start getting updates from their pages. Movies too. That is what happened. Things that facebook matched in my profile became part of my profile. Maybe I agreed to this. I don't remember. Besides, something else isn't right.
When I go to cnn.com, I get personal facebook information. That shouldn't happen. Obviously, cnn and facebook have a deal to share data. More like cnn is paying facebook to allow access to our facebook information. The very same thing with Pandora. Actually, Pandora starts playing and cnn.com displays recent posts, without first asking my permission. In fairness, Pandora does ask, as the music begins to play.
Google, on the other hand, has a ton of information on me. Every search. Four app domains and gmail. I just don't feel like I have to manage my google life as much as facebook forces me to manage theirs. I have never had to change a single privacy setting in gmail or on my igoogle page. My apps domains are a bit more complicated, but certainly not challenging.
Whenever you sign up with something that offers a facebook login, it will have access to your facebook data. Microsoft tried this with passport years ago. Why didn't it work? There are just some things people like to keep private. They differ from person to person and there is no way any one software / social media company can cater to all of those specific hidden secrets at once. So, you get what you get.
So, to be fair, I have indeed tested both. Neither of which are endorsed by facebook nor google, as far as I know. My netbook is a Samsung N150 Plus. Here is the jolicloud website. The ChromeOS build I am using is the most recent by Hexxeh, dated 10/28/2010.
jolicloud is very nice. It installs easily from windows and also allows you to download an ISO. I have not run jolicloud as a singular OS though I suspect there would be no additional performance gained by doing so. Aside from the bootloader choice delay, it boots right into jolicloud. Again, to be fair, I am writing this blog from a ChromeOS netbook.
The jolicloud windows install, when you boot into it, is truly a clean boot of the jolicloud OS. It's fast, the login is familiar (facebook login) and chrome is its featured browser. Make no mistake, jolicloud is not ChromeOS. I do not have access to the official google ChromeOS netbook, so I don't know for sure, but jolicloud is much more like a light-weight linux distro. It has quite a bit of "legacy" apps and access to an extensive linux repository. The most important to me being remmina, an RDP client.
I have yet to get remmina installed on my ChromeOS. So, as needed, until further notice, I will RDP from my phone.
The facebook login requirement prevents me from quickly choosing jolicloud over ChromeOS. I like the expanded linux operability of jolicloud. ChromeOS is completely dependent on the development of new apps, whereas jolicloud has the benefit of an enourmous linux repository.
That said, the bigger issue right now is that facebook NEEDS to manage the multiple branches of our relationships, and that is a bit of a harder job than what we currently ask google to do. Has it accepted the task? Can it find the right balance? It is all about managing access. I like the convenience of the single login, I just don't think it's there yet. Or I'm just not ready to trust it yet. It is the new kid on the block (sorry people my age) named facebook. Things came a long way today when I deleted most of the applications that had access to my facebook profile. There are another 50 things / people I have liked (sorta kinda) to go. One unlike at a time. It's a start, but facebook must make access a more proactive undertaking. Finding out that an app posted an inordinate amount of times on your behalf, no sir, don't like it.
I also may be a bit partial to google. Google apps has saved me an enormous amount of time. I use google open source code for things like google maps and geocoding directions dynamically from coordinates in my database. We even use the geocoding to determine those coordinates. Google also handles thousands of emails daily for our domains. We use them for our analytics (web stats), shared calendars and contact lists too.
So....
If my universal login is (x), what is (x)?
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