To me, one of the most compelling parts in Phil Windley’s recent white paper, “Introducing Forever: Personal Cloud Application Architectures,” was the emphasis placed on relationships between personal clouds.  A few statements that intrigued me (emphasis added):

One of the most important features of the Kynetx CloudOS is its built-in support for personal channels. …

Even more so than personal computers, personal clouds are only interesting when they are connected. The connection between two personal clouds—or between a personal cloud and anything else it is connected to is called a personal channel. The network of people and organizations linked via personal channels is called a relationship network. …

Personal channels on an open-standard relationship web can be dramatically more useful to individuals and businesses than ordinary email or Web connections. Forever makes use of personal channels by using them as the conduits over which permissioned access to profile information for the user’s contacts occurs.

I expect that relationships between personal clouds, not the personal clouds themselves, will provide the fuel to ignite and accelerate substantive growth in the use of personal clouds. The “network effect” emerging as an expanding social graph is instantiated in a personal cloud architecture could create a bandwagon of growing adoption.

The question remains … what “killer application” or set of applications built on a personal cloud architecture will trigger such a crescendo?