I worry about security; I don't want third party servers able to read or write to my files, pics of family, etc on the off chance they start to sell it to marketers and spamming companies for extra profit.
Not to mention, the my.pogoplug connector has so many things hard coded into it.. and a lot things simply do not have to be. My personal opinion is that this shows pure laziness, and a little paranoia.. and of course the system is so trivial that in itself, so that sort of thing is laughable imho. The sad thing is this hard codeddness get in the way of the functionality of the device, as shown by the fact that it actively breaks samba
My question is why would you want to recreate this service? You have a LOT more work to recreate their system on the server side than you do on the client side, and its not the code that is the hard part from the look of it. Hardware, a dedicated command in control network center for that large amount of connected devices and users, that is the hard part. They no doubt leveraged their cloud computing efforts on this, just as they leveraged the open source stuff for the client device. It would be much simpler if you only had to worry about one user, and made the software open source.
To tell you the truth, I have yet to see anything they created themselves, just parts they took from others and put together in ways that are common and part of the intended use of the pieces.