Because now, all the links that I had disseminated through the web with mine and my wife's phd thesis are gone. Not a good thing for the sake of publishing, right? There used to be a time when I could feel a service would be good enough so that it wouldn't fail its users. Now it appears that good enough means being bought by some bigger fish and not caring about their former users.
I trusted drop.io with a whole semester of data from my classes. It made a great souvenir of how the class went, with all the students comments topping the shared files. Sure, I have all the basic stuff in my hard disk and in my backup. But I lost *all* the publishing factor, all the data, all the publishing polishing. And frankly, if your work is not linked to a tweet or to some publishing platform then it doesn't matter.
The drop.io dudes just dropped down on their users and this is bad, very bad. I didn't have the paid service, but I imagine how paying users must have felt.
This is not good for the image of Facebook, either. They're like a company that doesn't care about the delicate eco-system of web-services. Drop.io was the best service around and now, it's gone.
Will they do a drop.io at Facebook? No. Why? Because they *deleted* everything they had!! So they don't want to transfer the experience over to the Facebook domain, like blogger did, like Writely did (they became google docs), they're going to do something completely different and it won't be the same experience!
At least when Google buys other companies, the service is maintained, integrated or improved. Sure, they stall at some point, because the team splits up, but they don't *delete* my data.
The Friendfeed guys, they also got bought by Facebook, but they made a serious effort to, at least, keep Friendfeed going on. It actually maintained its activity (and could even be growing). This tells me *a lot* about Paul Buchheit and associates integrity.
Frankly, I blame the drop.io leader for that. Not that he's a bad person, but I just can't trust him anymore on any of his service he'll build. He was actually sitting on a gold nugget and he flushed it down the toilet, but that's not why I don't like him... I don't like him because he doesn't seem to *care* for his users. To me, it's all that matters in the end. It's all about trusting, respecting and caring.
As for the gold nugget that went down the drain, drop.io could have become the de-facto new file-system (or tweet-system, like I like to call it) where each atom of information is not a dumb file, but is rather a tweet, a drop (not anymore), a status update, a check-in ... Now the analog to a tweet for files - drop.io style - is gone forever. Probably it will reemerge somewhere within Facebook's walled garden, but I don't care much for walled gardens... Why? Because *walls* don't empower me! Quite the opposite. I want power, I want data-portability and I want it now!
Alternatives? Sure, Dropbox is a hit in Portugal (windows prevalent). But it's old fashioned, it's transient technology. *It's collaborative but it's not a publishing platform!* It bridges legacy old-style file-systems with tweet-system. Personally, the Box.net was my favorite, before I discovered drop.io.
Frankly, the best alternative out there is Google docs. (that's where I'm heading ...)
(Btw, I want to thank the person that allowed me to retrieve all my data from Facebook. It would be so nice if I could do the same with Google with one-click - gmail, docs, blogger, picasaweb, youtube - pfffft! You know?...)
Sincerely, a User
Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media".
Because now, all the links that I had disseminated through the web with mine and my wife's phd thesis are gone. Not a good thing for the sake of publishing, right? There used to be a time when I could feel a service would be good enough so that it wouldn't fail its users.
Somebody wrote a while ago:
Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.
To which I add:
Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.
Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.
To which I add:
Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.
I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,
I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and
I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and
One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.
Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.
At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform.
At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform.
I'm reposting this entry posted back in April, in order to test some problems I'm having with the commenting systems...
Hello all, it's been a while since my last post.
Hello all, it's been a while since my last post.
Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
The ipad is probably more expensive than the Chrome OS... but the browser experience is better, much better. I'm bending towards buying an iPad for my mom, so that she'll start using a computer, finally! She bought a laptop because she wanted to get in touch with her kids and friends through gmail.
My mom sure could use one of those Google PCs.
She's a veteran school teacher. She doesn't like using computers and hates the fact that she has to configure them for the wifi connection.
She's a veteran school teacher. She doesn't like using computers and hates the fact that she has to configure them for the wifi connection.
There were a lot of reactions around the last post on Cinch. And some folks might be curious about the service and the iPhone app. So I decided to write a follow-up post (the title is possibly borrowed from someone else by now).
Wow, it's been a looong time since I posted something here. Lots of spider webs to clean up...
Anyway, I'm posting this entry to tell the world about this cool new thing I started using out of lately. It's called Cinch and it's the best thing since sliced-bread.
Anyway, I'm posting this entry to tell the world about this cool new thing I started using out of lately. It's called Cinch and it's the best thing since sliced-bread.
Update: if you want to check out what is cloud-computing in a secured sandboxed environment please follow this link.
When I first started this blog, I wanted to make a statement about my vision regarding the future of computing. I called this new thing the webtop. That was back in 2006.
When I first started this blog, I wanted to make a statement about my vision regarding the future of computing. I called this new thing the webtop. That was back in 2006.
Hi, I'm testing a javascript based syntax highlighter for this blog.
Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around.
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