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, November 26th, 2008
I Want Sandy Back
I just found out that I Want Sandy is going to go offline from December 8th and it’s really depressing news. I’ve just gotten used to emailing “her” and getting prompt reminders when I need to get things done, and when I’ve shared the service with people like Chloe, they’re always impressed with Sandy’s ability to understand emails and convert them to appropriate email reminders.
A few thoughts right now:
1) This is a reminder of how, maybe, we shouldn’t place too much trust in the “cloud”. I have reminders with Sandy going till mid 2009, stuff that I thought I could trust to be off my mind until I needed to think about them in 2009, and now I can’t rely on that anymore.
2) It’s been echoed a bit in the comments on the news post, but although not officially mentioned, the CEO of I Want Sandy is working for Twitter now. Given Twitter’s a) unreliability, b) removal of text messaging for everyone outside of North America and Europe, the rest of us are probably not going to enjoy I Want Sandy, even if she was relaunched by Twitter.
3) Trust issues? I’m marginally on the fence for this. Lots of people are commenting that they feel a little silly now that they were evangelising I Want Sandy and encouraging people to sign up. They feel a little slighted by the CEO’s departure to Twitter. I understand that, but I also understand in this economy, if it was what he had to do, it was what he had to do. Still, it brings to mind “with great power comes great responsibility”. When you get so many people around the world to buy into your great idea (and Sandy is a great idea), they expect you to be there through it all, and not jump ship when another offer comes around.
Do you use I Want Sandy? Will you be affected by the loss of her? How would you feel if one of your favourite apps was pulled from the web? Remember the Milk? ReQall?
Tags: cloud computing, i want sandy, i want sandy is gone, productivity tools, remember the milk, reqall, should we trust the cloud?, twitter, twitter's unreliability, with great power comes great responsibility
Posted in social media | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
As the name suggests, reQall helps you recall the stuff you need to do all day long. Although I’m pretty happy with Remember The Milk as a little add-on to my Gmail and I Want Sandy for meeting reminders and the like, the big advantage that reQall has over them is an iPod Touch application.
reQall becomes most effective when you’re in an environment that is highly connected. For me being in a school where there is wireless everywhere, and a home that’s wifi enabled is more than enough. The Firefox extension allows you to enter “What popped into your head”, and it understands simple context like dates and times, which is exactly what I need. So I’d be surfing or chatting to someone and someone says “oh by the way the assignment is due next Monday”, I can type that immediately right from my Firefox browser.
One other thing I like about the interface of reQall, is that it’s separated into an actual to-do list that is time-sensitive, a shopping list and a notes list. There’s even an option to upload images to trigger your memory, if that works for you. I really like the shopping list and notes function now that I’m living pretty much on my own. Everytime something runs out I just enter it in from my iPod Touch and sync it up and when I head out to the store, it’s all in one place (you don’t need internet access to retrieve data from your iPod Touch).
If you’re like me and was thinking long and hard about updating your iPod Touch software to 2.0, I’d almost say that the reQall app alone would be reason enough for me to pay that $9.99, so consider giving it a try.
Tags: gmail, gtd, i want sandy, ipod touch apps, notes, online productivity apps, productivity, remember the milk, remembering things to do, reqall, shopping lists, to do lists, wifi, wireless coneections
Posted in Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
After the terrible experience with Todoist, I went on to experiment with Remember The Milk. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was covered in part 3 of Twitter 201 under best apps to use with Twitter.
So why is Remember The Milk such a great improvement over Todoist?
1) Complete step by step guides for various features
2) The Twitter plugin
3) The Gmail plugin – everytime I open my Gmail, the tasks I have yet to do are staring at me in the face. No way around it.
Their online interface and brilliant way of weaving in other platforms like Twitter and Gmail has even made me switch over to Firefox for the first time, and even give serious thought to paying $25/year for their premium service, including MilkSync, so I can use it on my phone.
Two companies operating on the internet. One fully embracing Web2.0 and understanding exactly what customers online want, the other, utterly clueless. What do you think?
Tags: embrace web2.0, gmail plugin, milksync, remember the milk, todoist, twitter, twitter 201, twitter plugin
Posted in social media | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
Roughly trawling through 10 webpages and roughly 470 comments later, I’m ready to “graduate” to Twitter201 and give you a good if not definitive guide to Twitter and it’s uses. This will be part 1 of 3, so check back or subscribe to my RSS feed to know when parts 2 and 3 are out.
What Is Twitter?
Twitter is a mashup between instant messaging (IM), email, facebook and even sms. It’s mobile, can be targeted specifically at friends or widely at anyone you choose, is instantaneous, and social.
When you visit Twitter, you’ll be prompted: “What are you doing?” and that’s exactly what Twitter does: let your friends/acquaintances know what you’re doing at any given time. For example, mine currently says “yet another great cup of Hazelnut latte at Borders Bistro”, that lets people know what I’m doing and where I’m at. Let me just say that that’s a bad example of how to use Twitter, and a good example of “noise”. More on that in part 2.
If I haven’t made it clear by now, Twitter’s usage is to help you stay connected with whoever you choose.
More Twitter Usages
Besides connecting people, Twitter also allows you to ask questions to find out more about what the people in your network think or what they’re doing. A really good example is found on ProBlogger where Darren got 30 responses to a question in 10 minutes. (You should really click on the link and check out the screenshots to get an idea of what I’m saying).
Also Twitter can be used very easily as a traffic generating device. Everytime I have a new blogpost, I announce it on Twitter for anyone who’s interested.
Twitter can also be used as a to-do-list. Remember The Milk is a cool site where you can send messages to your Twitter to remember stuff like, well, buying milk. If your phone is internet or wi-fi enabled, this can be even more useful because you can just update your Twitter status to remind yourself to do something later.
Finally, Twitter can be used for friendsourcing. Surfing around Twitter the past few days, I’ve seen quite a few tweets going like “need a ______ on behalf of a friend”, which can be really useful if there’s something specific you need, and a particular audience you want to tap onto.
Before I end, let me say that this list is nowhere near exhaustive and of course there are business uses that I’ve neglected to mention. Given that I don’t own a business, I don’t think I have the necessary expertise to talk about that. Also, this guide is targeted at the average blogger trying to figure out how to use Twitter for the first time, I’ve decided to leave out all the business bits.
Part 2 should be up tomorrow, covering what you need to do to make Twitter useful, as well as how to grow your Twitter network. Meanwhile you may want to check out my previous posts Twitter 101, Twitter 102 and Twitter 103, as well as let me know what’s on your mind with regards to Twitter in the comments below!
PS: If you like what I’m doing, please add me to your Technorati favourites (
) and/or follow me on Twitter, user: uniquefrequency
Tags: connectivity, email, facebook, friendsourcing, howto, im, network, problogger, remember the milk, sms, to do list, todo, traffic, traffic generator, twitter 101, twitter 102, twitter 103, twitter 201, twitter how to, twitter howto, twitter usages, twitter uses, twitter101, twitter102, twitter103, twitter201
Posted in social media, twitter | 7 Comments »
