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
Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.
Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal. He happens to play ball - real hard - both at the White House AND at Google. He's playing with fire though, and it could easily backfire on his employers.
The new Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the XXIst century, a prototypical example of the lacquay that out-wits the masters of the house he serves. This article, and the Edward Snowden case, are a glympse iMHO to a silent-war going on, mostly between the future world-dominating nations (or corporations???), US, China, ..., but also Facebook, Google, Baidu, etc ...
Scenarios outcomes? I would bet on political borders to become obsolete, and on social-network based new nations (or tribes?). Alexander, Julius, Napoleon, Adolf and Benito, they all had big plans, but they just missed the right technology to make the entire world yield into whole "Gaia Pax". Today, technology is almost ripe, almost, to make it a breeze to administrate over 100 billions of citizens, within the blink of a byte. Not only there CAN be only one, but I'd wager, there WILL be only one. It's only a matter of WHEN, and it's definitively not an IF.
For those who fight on good side of the force, I have only one word for advice (or is it three?): "peer-to-peer". Stick with this notion deeply incepted in your mind and we'll be safe enough. NrÂș1 enemies? Anything that qualifies as a "walled-gardens" ;-)
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