Mirror.me is a Champaign, IL-based start up and may be the best looking twitter tag cloud mashup since tweetcloud itself. What do you think?

Google took us further into the digital media future with some compelling announcements at the fourth annual Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco this week. Recent Google I/O keynotes seem silly in retrospect — both Google Wave and Buzz were epic busts. But this year Google narrowed its focuses to it’s strengths, namely the Android mobile operating system and the Chrome browser and operating system. The gist was this: Use Google’s web-based tools and applications, combine with seemingly infinite storage space in the cloud, and bulky hard drives and desktop PC’s will become mere artifacts of our technological evolution. A Google account combined with a device running Android or Chrome OS will be all you need to do [almost] anything.

The day one keynote (video) included the expected launch of Google’s cloud-based music locker. Google Music Beta, currently invite only, was launched without proper licensing from labels, publishers, and artists. In skirting questions regarding working with labels, Google consistently claimed it had big plans but couldn’t comment on the ongoing negotiations. The beta is a bit half-baked from a user perspective, essentially one must download a Music Manager application to upload mp3s from a computer to a cloud-based server, which then can be played via the web-based player at music.google.com or via the Google Music Android application. Google currently doesn’t offer any MP3s for purchase or download, however, a sampling of tracks from various genres are made available for new users to add to their collections and stream from the cloud. Amazon, which does have a web- and mobile-based mp3 downloads store, launched a cloud-streaming application earlier this year. Apple is rumored to have a cloud-streaming app in the works.

Google also expanded its Android Marketplace to include Books and Movies. Movies can be rented for streaming on the web and on some Android tablets (it was announced that it will soon be available on Google TVs as part of an upcoming full Android Marketplace integration). Movies can be rented via market.android.com/movies from $1.99 – $3.99. Google beat Netflix by about a day with this announcement, as Netflix began rolling out its streaming video service for Android devices on Thursday.

The opening-night afterparty was dubbed Infinite Playground and, as you can see in this video, included awesome inventions such as the Bicycle-Powered Merry-Go-Round in addition to the self-driving Google car and various robots. All enjoyed to a live soundtrack performed by Jane’s Addiction, DJs Mark Farina and Miguel Migs (watch video of all 3 sets).

The highlight of the Day Two keynote (video) was the launch announcement of the Google Chromebook. In June the Chromebook — a netbook with cloud-based applications built specifically for the enterprise and education — will hit the streets, with Samsung and Acer as partners. The Chromebooks will be available to businesses for $28 per user per month and to educational institutes for $20 per user per month.

The Chromebooks, with 11.6-inch (Acer) or 12.1-inch HD displays (Samsung), will be available to consumers from $349 for the Acer to $429 (WiFi only) and $499 (3G) for the Samsung.

Google I/O has become wildly popular thanks in great part to valuable giveaways in previous years (the Nexus One in 2010 and the Android G2 phone in 2009) and this year topped all in that department. Google I/O 2011 sold out in under an hour (early bird registration was $450 for the two-day event). All 5,000 attendees this year were given the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet a month before it’s available in stores. (Disclaimer: I] shamelessly accepted this gift).

Both Android and Chrome are built on Open Source platforms which provides both developers and users more flexibility and control in customizing or optimizing devices using the operating systems. The I/O conference is not only a showcase for developers who have found ingenious ways to create applications, robots, cars, etc, that rely on Google tools in some form or fashion.

Originally posted at LAist on May 13, 2011

What does this mean? We haven’t been able to monitor our social networks with Hootsuite, check in on Foursquare, ask questions on Quora, or check in on the real news of the day at Reddit for… going on twelve hours!

When can we freely procrastinate again? Amazon’s latest update asks us to give them “a few hours.” But that’s just a “high-level ballpark estimate.”

“Stream it from the cloud.” “Just back it up to the cloud.”

We’ve all heard it said and many of us rely on “the cloud” whether we realize it or not. In most cases its extremely reliable, especially with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Except, of course, when it’s down.

See AllThingsD for a long post of updates and a list of companies and online services affected by the outage.

Cloud computing, relies on a network of remote servers to host and deliver content. It is generally less expensive and more reliable than managing assets (and backups) in house. When you stream music from SoundCloud, use Google Docs, upload content to your tumblr or use Dropbox or MobileMe to sync you are accessing The Cloud.

Amazon’s EC2 serves a slightly different purpose. Instead of having a content backup and delivery focus, its primary function is to deliver dynamic processor speeds to businesses. This makes it possible for companies with staggering traffic trends to pay for only the CPUs necessary as opposed to paying to power and maintain the equivalent of a supercomputer to serve the occasional burst in traffic. Amazon’s more traditional cloud product is Amazon Web Services, which hosts tons of content, including, for example, your Twitter profile photo.

What websites will you be checking out in the meantime while you’re stuck at home because Obama is bringing a traffic nightmare to town?

This post was syndicated from LAist.com, where I am Associate Editor. A direct link to my LAist.com post index is at the top of my blog. This post was originally published here on April 21, 2011 at 12:20 p.m.