Thanks to my smartphone, I don’t carry my laptop very much, unless I’m doing a presentation or going on an extended trip. But it’s nice to have my desktop sync with my laptop, so that it’s ready when I need it. And that’s where things start getting complicated.

My desktop’s a Mac mini, and my laptop’s a Toshiba Libretto U105 (which was a netbook before they started calling them that) running Windows XP. So how do I synchronize my data? It can be done, but it’s harder than it should be.

• Contacts. I use the Apple Address Book, and sync it to my Google Contacts with Googaby. On the laptop, I use Thunderbird with the gContactSync add-on.
• Calendar. I set up several calendars through Google Apps. I’ve subscribed to the calendars in both Apple iCal (on the Mac) and Mozilla Sunbird (on the PC). Alas, the future of Sunbird is unclear at the moment.
• Passwords. I use SplashID because it syncs flawlessly with my Treo, although I’ve also been experimenting with LastPass, which is better at filling in some web forms, but is a bit obtrusive for my taste.
• Bookmarks. For those of us who use Firefox, Weave will probably be a great system someday. But right now, it’s too experimental: It only supports the upcoming Firefox 3.5, and it has a tendency to stop working at random intervals. In the meantime, I’m reluctantly using Xmarks — which strikes me as trying to do too many things. If you turn off all of the options except bookmark syncing, the Firefox add-on seems to work fine. But the Safari version is hard to install and obtrusive. (I mostly use Firefox anyway, so I turned Xmarks for Safari off.)
• Files. Dropbox. It’s easy. It just works.

If you’re wondering how all of these programs get along, well, they do, mostly. Googaby slows my Mac to a crawl when it’s updating, but it doesn’t update very often. Dropbox and Missing Sync work perfectly, and without getting in the way.

So why don’t I just use the web interfaces of all of these programs, and not worry about syncing?

It’s nice to have local backups in case Google goes down (which it does occasionally) or if my Internet connection goes south (which is does more often than I would like). Google Gears helps, but it’s not as smooth as having local copies of everything.

Both Apple Mail and Thunderbird make it much easier to manage and transfer messages between multiple accounts. Gmail Manager is a great way of accessing multiple accounts through Firefox, but it doesn’t let me drag and drop messages between accounts, like I can in Apple Mail.

One of these days, we might be able to use any computer, any browser, and get to our own “mobile desktop.” Glide is working on such a system, as are Xcerion, although neither system is complete.

In the meantime, syncing basic data between computers is much too complex. As long as desktop applications are more robust than their web counterparts, sync will be needed, so let’s hope easier and more user-friendly systems are on the way.

How do you manage data in multiple locations?

Image by stock.xchng user flaivoloka

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Monday saw the release of a major update to Weave, bringing in several new features and, tellingly, locating Weave at a subdomain of Mozilla, named ‘services‘, implying that Weave will be the umbrella for a number of web-based service coming from Mozilla’s commercial arm. Also telling is the hackable and very social URL issued to a user on signup (in my case, http://services.mozilla.com/user/imran)

So what’s new?

• Installation is much simpler, being no more complex than installing any other Firefox plugin, though worryingly users are warned to backup their local firefox profile prior installation (likely a results of Weave’s experimental status).
• The ability to store not only bookmarks, but browser history, cookies, passwords, form entries and the current set of open tabs – essentially all the data necessary to ‘resurrect’ your Firefox profile on another device…I wonder if Weave will extend to Mozilla’s non-PC efforts for mobile devices.
• A manually configurable synchronization tool to keep your online and local profiles aligned.
• Encryption of data during synchronization and indeed the possibility of sharing profile data with third parties with the user’s consent.
• The potential for XMPP-based notification.

Though Weave is far from stable and various features still work in a haphazard manner, the current update illustrates an exciting path to the future for Mozilla, finally moving into the cloud, application data from most web worker’s most powerful and useful application.

The possibilities for Weave are enormous, notably the possibility of sharing parts of your profile with third parties. Perhaps Weave and Firefox will be the nexus points at which OpenID, Data Portability and the Open Social Graph will be centralized and useable enough to break into mainstream usage.

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