My Online Thoughts & Pontifications

But this announcement that they are able to decrypt the files on behalf of the government contradicts their prior public statements. They claim that Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files.

This announcement means that Dropbox never had any mechanism to prevent employees from accessing your files, and it means that Dropbox never had the crypto smarts to ensure the privacy of your files and never had the smarts to only decrypt the files for you. It turns out, they keep their keys on their servers, and anyone with clearance at Dropbox or anyone that manages to hack into their servers would be able to get access to your files.

Worrying article by Miguel de Icaza today where he points to the changes in Dropbox’s security clauses in their terms of service and admittance that they can provide the US government with your files at their request. This is contradictory to their previous claims that their staff are unable to access to your files and the first negative news I have seen in a long time about the cloud computing and synchronisation darling of the tech world.

Dropbox is still a great service and I would continue to recommend it to others, especially when compared to the terrible iDisk on the Mac. However I would also recommend that people take the same approach that I do and encrypt any sensitive data in sparse bundles within Dropbox, to ensure prying eyes are unable to access your data. If sparse bundles confuse you then take a look at Knox from the excellent Agile Web Solutions, which will take the pain away for you at an extremely reasonable price.

What's green and looking a bit shaky? No, not Kermit on a booze binge.

We mean Spotify's free service. From 1 May free users can only listen to 10 hours of music, and individual tracks can only be heard five times apiece.

So where do you go if you can't or won't pay for Spotify Unlimited or Premium?

Good article by Techradar.com looking at the alternative options to Spotify, following their announcement yesterday that they would be restricting the free service to only 10 hours of music.

Personally I'm not a big user of the service but I no many who are, so if you want to listen to more than 10 hours a month you either need to upgrade to the Spotify premium service or look elsewhere.

Mflow definitely looks like an interesting alternative

The kick-off agenda builder is a fancy name for a very simple little web app (its insulting to even call it that). Its essentially a list of all the subjects that one might possibly cover in a kick-off meeting for most web projects. Each element comes with a description that will help educate the client while reminding the project team of things that must be covered. The descriptions also occasionally include links that go into more depth on a particular subject.

Headscape have just released a great little web app for all project managers, allowing you to quickly and easily build an agenda for a project kick off meeting.

Its fully customisable, allowing you to pick and choose the items that are relevant to your specific project. The best feature in my mind though is that it includes an overview of what each section will cover. This is not only great for educating customers ahead of meetings, specifically those that are new to the web but also as an internal aid memoir for team members who be new to running meetings such as these.

You can access The Kick-off Agenda Builder directly from the Headscape website or download it and install it on a server of your choosing. The sourcecode has also been released under creative commons license so you can further enhance it if required.

Read the full article about it on Boagworld

A number of prominent UK technology news sites have seen their Google rankings drop substantially after the search engine rolled out its "Panda" update, intended to demote sites which scrape content from others, to the UK and other English-language Google users.

Well if your site is one that scraps a lot of content then I'm afraid its bad news for you, with your site plummeting in the rankings or disappearing altogether.

There are notable exceptions to this with a number of technology news websites, like UK based Tech Radar for example being affected and seeing their rankings drop. Interestingly Microsoft owned Ciao has also seen their site drop in the rankings as a result, with some speculating that this may have more to do with the fact they logged a complaint with the EC about Google using their monopoly unfairly. Highly unlikely but fun all the same!

The good news is that if you have been following standard SEO advice, of generating good readable content which your users enjoy, then you should see your rankings increase. This is because the new algorithm takes into consideration the amount of time a user spends on your site.

All in all a good upgrade I think, with sites with good original content getting a boost and the sites clogged full of scrapped content disappearing from the top of the search results.

Really good video about Scrivener 2 and how Yuvi Zalkow fits this into his workflow.

Mr Sarver, head of platform and API at Twitter, used the company's software development discussion board to outline its changing policy.

In it, he said, Twitter's growth in the last year from 48 million to 140 million Tweets per day had forced it to think about how users get at the service.

Before now, many people have spurned the official Twitter application or client in favour of alternatives such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, Echofon, HootSuite and others.

In the blog post, Mr Sarver posed the question of whether building Twitter clients was going to continue to be a good business to be in.

"The answer is no", he wrote.

As somebody who actively chooses to use third party applications over the official twitter ones, so as to support third party developers, statements such as this are extremely worrying. While the Twitter app on both the Mac and iPhone, formly know as Tweetie, are extremely good, there are other equally good if not better solutions out there. With Weet (iPhone and Mac) and Twitterific (Mac) my current personal favourites.

Imagine if this was Microsoft or Apple making statements such as this about their platforms, there would be complete uproar!

While I am sure there will be suitable ranting over this statement it does point to a worrying trend for web start-ups who opened up their service to gain traction and wide spread exposure but are ultimately struggling to monetise their success.

I have every sympathy with Twitter and their situation but cannot believe that they are seriously considering this dramatic change of course. My guess is they are putting out this extreme position to then allow them to rail back to something less aggresive which people would then be prepared to accept, which they wouldn't have it it was the original suggestion. This is a tactic we have seen used by other larger organisations in the past to great success.

My guess would be changes in the T&C's of the API to force third party apps to use Twitter driven advertisements for instance within their timeline for instance, with a potential share of the profits to pasify them. This could see the end of free clients on most platforms which rely on advertising to support them but as always time will tell.

On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called "sunset". The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit. [*]

I got the message just as I was starting work for the day. My Twitter client, normally a place where I might see ten or twenty daily mentions of Pinboard, had turned into a nonstop blur of updates. My inbox was making a kind of sustained pealing sound I had never heard before. It was going to be an interesting afternoon.

Really interesting article by the founder of Pinboard on how they coped with the phenominal increase in traffic they experience following Yahoo's botched announcement that they would be running down their Delicious online bookmarking service.

A bit in here for everybody from tech heads to customer service rep's to people just interested in the inner workings of a succesful online service. Its a really interesting read and as one of the thousands who jumped ship over that weekend and moved to Pinboard, I have to admit to feeling a little guilty about the sleepness nights we all caused.

Its a great service, so if you haven't tried it all ready I strongly recommend you take a look at Pinboard.in or read the article in full on the Pinboard Blog.

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

Interesting blog post by Google, where they outline the evidence behind their accusation that Microsoft have been using Google search results to alter their own results.

Looks pretty damming to me and shame to see Microsoft resorting to such tactics

As a co-founder of Syncplicity, a service that competes with Dropbox, this question has been on my mind for years. We launched within a few weeks of Dropbox, we had multi-folder synchronization & read-only sync, and we were a few years older than the Dropbox kids. I'm very proud of the service we put together and am happy to see the service shift towards businesses, yet Dropbox kicked butt. Here's why:

Great insight by Isaac Hall on how Dropbox (one of my favourite online services) used a combination of viral marketing, closed beta'sand simple and focussed product development to become the great success that it is.