Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Although I have a great love for Evernote, the loss of I Want Sandy is still fresh in my mind. Combine that with Wired’s report that Ma.gnolia suffered major data loss that was referred to as “catastrophic” and the closure of Google Notebook, one can’t help but wonder how safe it is to keep items in the “cloud”.
But… You didn’t pay for it!
This seems to be a recurring comment when such applications die. We didn’t pay for Sandy or Notebook, why should we be upset that they’re gone? Perhaps the internet has fundamentally changed the way we think of consumption. Just because we don’t contribute directly to Google or MSN or Facebook when we use Gmail or Live Messenger, doesn’t mean we’re not contributing at all. Without the network effect of many users congregating around a certain service, where would the ad dollars be?
On the flip side, just because you paid for a service, doesn’t mean it won’t go under. It happens in the physical world, the online world is no different.
Portability
When Google Notebook announced it would be discontinuing support for the service, Evernote quickly rose to the occasion to provide easy exporting of users’ Notebooks to Evernote. Perhaps the issue of service shuttering wouldn’t be as tragic if such movements were the norm, but what do you do when your data is lost, as in the case of Ma.gnolia? How often do you want to do a sync between Google Bookmarks, Delicious and Ma.gnolia? Especially considering their ways of tagging bookmarks are different? Is there a need for a common “standard”?
Looking forward
I feel a little more comfortable with companies like Google and Evernote because unlike Sandy which was a one man team, they’re actual companies with a team or teams of people. But that doesn’t put my mind totally at ease that one day, a cloud service I rely heavily on will lose stuff of extreme value to me, and I would have no idea what to do next.
What are you doing to safeguard yourself from such an occurrence? What would you do if Gmail lost half your emails? If Remember The Milk lost all reminders more than a month into the future? What if your videos chronicling your life over the last six months disappeared on Vimeo or YouTube? Do you avoid such situations entirely by still relying on paper and/or a local hard disk?
Tags: catastrophic, data loss, delicious, evernote, facebook, gmail, google notebook, i want sandy, live messenger, magnolia, msn, portability, remember the milk, safety of keeping data in the cloud, vimeo, wired, youtube
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Daphne plurked today about leaving Plurk to concentrate on ping.sg as well as Twitter and because things were just getting too overwhelming for her to keep up with everything at once.
It got me thinking about whether this is a natural progression of sorts. People join an online community until the benefits of another (uptime for Plurk) far outweigh the previous benefits of another (Twitter), or the conversations on Plurk are more intense/genuine than those on the shoutbox on ping.sg. What do we do when that happens?
I know Pat Law has mentioned a very good point that people move on to better value propositions. That’s why we’re not on Friendster or ICQ anymore. If the community shifts to a new “tool”, should it matter? After all it’s people-centric rather than platform-centric isn’t it?
Of course, I’m not saying either ping.sg or Twitter are inferior, unworthy platforms. I think ping is still great for getting the latest buzz in the local blogosphere and log on at least thrice a day to check out the newest posts, Twitter runs in the background on Twhirl for stuff to pop up once in awhile. But when faced with a new, potentially better tool, what happens?
One reason also why the ping.sg shoutbox is less “vibrant” now is because many of the pingsters are on Plurk as well. This suggests that people see more value there, or are joining it because everyone is as well, or a combination of both, but that results in ping.sg being less lively. Natural evolution of online platforms? Innovate and keep your communities or die?
I pretty much understand where Daphne is coming from, so I ask the local community because I’m curious: If you’ve shifted to Plurk, do you feel like you should stick with your previous platforms just ‘cos? Or does the higher value proposition outweigh all? Very curious to know the various views behind this.
Tags: daphnemaia, facebook, friendster, icq, msn, patlaw, ping.sg, ping.sg shoutbox, Plurk, plurk vs twitter, singaporean blogosphere
Posted in Plurk, Singapore, Social Networks, community, social media, twitter | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
It hit me in the shower last night why exactly Twitter is so powerful. It’s like IRC.
No, I’m not kidding and don’t run away yet.
Today @stripedshirt and @valene were talking about why MSN (aka IM) isn’t used by them anymore, simply because it’s too distracting. On top of that, MSN mostly allows for one-to-one conversations (yes I know you can add more people to conversations), but Twitter is cool in that you can have many people adding to a conversation at different times of the day and it’ll continue on.
And that’s what I like most about Twitter and that’s why it’s so powerful. It requires a short amount of attention, but it allows you to feel connected and part of a community more than IM does (at least for me). A real example is when a few of us just got started on Twitter. Me (@uniquefrequency), Andre (@stripedshirt) and Valene (@valene). So 3 of us kinda were messaging here and there but with only 3 people, there wasn’t much benefits to reap in terms of network externalities.
Fastforward 4-6 weeks, add in Andre’s group’s great presentation on microblogging, and now we have Nabilah (@allquirknoplay), Jacqueline (@jacquelinechang), Amelia (@amsie), Lionel (@gaothebao), Peiling (@gniliep), Alaska (@alaskie), Xiao Hui (@thehsuperficies), Mark (@beatmastermark), Gladys (@gladyschock) and Christina (@tinana).
The best part is I have less than half of these people on my MSN list, and yet I talk more to most of them than to other people on my MSN list.
It’s like IRC in that we all drop in the same “room” at different times of the day and maybe I’ll know that some of them are in the library, some are awake at 5am finishing a project, who’s in a Starbucks, and the list goes on. It’s come to a stage where we even have @SMUtweets to tweet school-related stuff to all of us. How cool is that?
To me, Twitter has truly become the new social water cooler.
You might argue that 13 of us out of a school population of 4,500 is insignificant. But is it really? If you were a company and you had 13 passionate advocates following your brand on Twitter, Tweeting things to each other and spreading your brand and/or message, wouldn’t you be happy? (Wouldn’t it be great if Frujch could tell us when the queue is short? Or if portobello melts are running out so we can ZOOM down to get the last few?)
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and here’s an experiment I want to run: All of us SMU students currently on Twitter should aim to get one, just one, other friend on Twitter by Week 14 (just lean over to the person next to you in the library and do some convincing!). We’re going to try to double the SMU-Twitter population and see just how far we can go with this in really forming a community and network, and see what comes out of it.
Post your success stories and/or great Twitter stories in the comments section so we’ll know who to follow and we’ll review this experiment in 2 weeks! Let’s keep in mind that getting new people to sign up on Twitter is just the first step, we need to make them feel welcome to get them to stick around and enjoy it as much as we do!
Tags: alaska, alaskie, allquirknoplay, amelia, amsie, beatmastermark, christina, curiousfoodie, frujch, gaothebao, gniliep, im, instant messaging, irc, jacqueline, jacquelinechang, lionel, mark, microblogging, microsoft messenger, msn, nabilah, online conversations, peiling, smu twitter, smutweets, social media experiment, social water cooler, stripedshirt, thehsuperficies, tinana, twitter, twitter community, twitter experiment, twitter network, twitter population, twitter stories, uniquefrequency, valene, water cooler effect, xiaohui
Posted in SMU, Singapore, twitter | 17 Comments »
