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
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