Grimwire appears to be an interesting answer to the problem where web-apps are convenient and useful, but require you to give all your data to the app publisher and let them store it for you, rendering them disastrous from a security and privacy point of view.

The page does a poor job of explaining this, but as far as I can tell Grimwire is a system for decoupling web-apps from storage mechanisms. It aims to provide a common interface between frontend applications and backend storage providers, so that you can pick the tools you want to use and retain control of the data you want to manipulate with them.

Something like this ought to exist, and I wish them luck. I have my own server, after all – you’re looking at it – and I often use a webmail client to read & send mail on my own server when I’m not at home. I’d be much more interested in using systems like Google Docs if I could store the data on my own server in a similar fashion.