Prediction:

The term ‘cloud’ will become the most overused buzzword of 2009.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love that we’re at a point (EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc) where we have massive computing power and storage space served up from some remote location at the fraction of the cost than infrastructure that I had to previously build out myself.

I also love the fact that now in 2009 I can tap into a wide variety of data sources (i.e. API’s) that are floating around out there to enable my iPhone, web or client applications. But wait a second, is that really cloud computing?

I also use Dreamhost for my web hosting. They offer me unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, burstable system resources, analytics and a wide variety of application execution engines (pretty much whatever I want, actually). Couldn’t that considered cloud?

But then, I guess my iDisk is cloud too.. since it offers me storage space ‘not here’, just someplace in the ether.

Wait a second – I thought cloud computing was about virtualization.

Heck, even AT&T now does hosting for my VM’s, storage, utility mail and infrastructure services.

So I guess the basic gist is that anything on the Internet, that I don’t host myself, can be cloud. The term ‘cloud’ can mean a variety of different things to people, and unfortunately will suffer through the same hype machine that RSS, Web 2.0 and social networks have undergone the last few years.

And that’s its problem. Buzzword overkill. Furrygoat’s Law. Irrational exuberance.