Tim McNamara

Dropbox, Wuala, Spideroak - Free online backup storage reviewed

This post, we’ll be comparing three online backup providers: Dropbox, Wuala & Spideroak. Dropbox has recently encountered security problems, so what else is there?

If you notice any inaccuracies, please send through any corrections and I’ll update the post.

Overview

(Question marks remain for Dropbox due to its latest security concerns)

Pricing

Notes about the graph:

• Dropbox only supports 100GB.
• Prices are per month for an annual subscription.
• Note that prices for Wuala can be substancially reduced, e.g. down to $0, if you share your own hard drive capacity.

About the products

Dropbox has been a clear leader in online storage. This is largely because of its simplicity. When asked about why it has been success a success, Michael Wolfe makes the point that the ideal backup solution would look like the following:

There would be a folder.
You’d put your stuff in it.
It would sync.

That’s about the limit of what Dropbox does. It focused on creating a simple, attractive interface with minimal, useful features. These include being able to create shared folders easily.

Wuala has a greater emphasis on sharing and security. In addition to being a pure backup solution, it enables you to share data securely with people you trust.

It encrypts your data, then uploads it into a global peer-to-peer network. In fact, rather than buying storage space, you are able to trade space on your own hard drive . This could be attractive where you have an external hard drive with free capacity. This peer-to-peer system creates instant, global redundancy for your data.

Spideroak also prides itself for its ability to keep your data secure. It uses central servers, like Dropbox to store your data, but maintains a ‘no knowledge’ approach. Your data is encrypted before it is sent to their machines and their staff don’t know your password to decrypt it.

Details

Cross portability All three providers support Linux, OS X & MS Windows.

Mobile All three providers support Android & iPhone. Dropbox goes further and supports Blackberry.

Web Wuala suffers ever so slightly in this space. In order to access your information, you need to have a web browser that supports Java applets. Yes, that’s every browser with an add-on. Wuala does this because the data is decrypted only by local machines. In their eyes, providing a pure web application would mean that they would need to be able to access your information.

Privacy & Security Wuala and Spideroak focus on security very heavily. For example, neither of them send your password to the companies’ servers. This means, it is impossible for them to ever look into files that you have stored in the cloud. Dropbox stores its data on the Amazon’s S3 service. This can make it susceptible to PATRIOT Act requests as well as illegal breaches.

Sharing All three providers allow you to share your information with others you know easily. This is usually achieved by clicking on an share option, then being given a URL to share with others.

One thing that’s unique to Wuala is globally shared folders. You can create folders which are public to everyone on Wuala. There are folders with Creative Commons music and videos, for example.

Ease of Use Dropbox is the easiest tool to use, which is why it’s so successful. A folder is created on your computer which you drag into.

Wuala is very similar. It gives you a drive though, rather than a single folder. Spideroak works by selecting folders in its interface. There is no drag and drop from your file manager.

Pricing All of the providers have simple pricing structures based on data stored. The most complex is Wuala, which also enables you to trade your own disk space in return for online storage.

Storing old versions All three providers store previous versions of files.

Installation Experience

I found Spideroak’s installation procedure a little confusing. It uses the term “Create a Device” when it means “Set up your computer”. When seeing “Creating a Device”, I thought that it wanted to partition a drive for its own use.

Three easy ways to get into the Semantic Web

So, you’ve been curious about this whole Semantic Web thing. Perhaps you would like search engines to put useful things up next to your links when someone searches for you. Maybe you’re interested by the possibility that smart bots could track down information from across the web via Linked Data to provide Internet users with the most up-to-date information possible from its original source.

Whatever the reason — getting started with the Semantic Web is a mental stretch. Thankfully, there are ways to make your information useful to machines without needing to know OWL, ontology or the rest of the jargon. Each of these three methods simply extends the HTML code that you already know.

RSS

RSS feeds have always been sematically great. In fact, by using RSS, you’re publishing your content as RDF, the Resource Description Framework. RDF is the main way that machines resolve resources’ ambiguity. They use URIs to do that. There are many Tims in the world, but only one lives at timmcnamara.co.nz.

Open Graph Protocol

The Open Graph Protocol is a way to get your data to completely simplify everything. Pushed by Facebook, it’s bound to get a greater following in the months to come as it’s simplicity to implement. One of the problems it immediately resolves is displaying your information correctly when it is shared on Facebook.

Take a look at this HTML snippet, representing the move The Rock:

<html xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
  <title>The Rock (1996)</title>
  <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
  <meta property="og:type" content="movie" />
  <meta property="og:url" 
     content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
  <meta property="og:image" 
     content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />
  ...
</head>
...
</html> 

What we’ve done here is define an og namespace, and then use it within meta tags. Pretty simple. Facebook has done something great here, making <meta> tags is now one of the easiest ways to get started with the Semantic Web.

Common Tag

Common Tag is an effort to make data able to be included into massive Linked Data stores, such as Freebase. It focuses specifically on tagging content. That is, for authors to add categories and topics to their content.

The idea behind Common Tag is to reconcile the problem of using different tags for the same thing. For example, if you’re looking for images in Flickr from New York, NY, they’re probably tagged nyc, new_york, newyorkcity and so on. Common Tag avoids this by providing a single, unambiguous reference.

Here’s a snippet representing the band U2.

<body xmlns:ctag="http://commontag.org/ns#"
          rel="ctag:tagged">
  <span typeof="ctag:Tag" 
        rel="ctag:means" 
        resource="http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.u2" 
        property="ctag:label" 
        content="U2"/>
    U2
  </span>
</body>

Under the hood, we’re using a technology you may have heard of - RDFa. The most important part of this snippet is the resource section. It is the unambiguous reference to the content that you’re talking about. However, the process is very similar to the Open Graph Protocol above. First, we define a namespace, then we use it in our HTML. There are several interesting things you can do with Common Tag, including declaring whether content has been tagged by authors or by users. You should read the Common Tag Getting Started Guide to learn more.

Three easy ways to use hard tools

Each of the tools we’ve described here allows you to use a different piece of the Semantic Web pie in bit sized pieces. By using the simple tools above, you’re actually using the very scary tools you’ve been avoiding:

• RSS means you’re using RDF
• Open Graph Protocol means you’re adding usable metadata to your meta tags
• Common Tag exposes RDFa to User-Agents

Easy Competitor Analysis with Twitter

Twitter has Search

To get a sense of a competitor’s level of engagement, http://search.twitter.com is a great tool. To begin, just add a user’s name in the search bar. You’ll be greeted with every message to and from that account within the last 3 or so days.

The search interface makes it very simple to see exactly who is talking to your target company, what they are talking about and how your target company responds. In essence, you are privy to their complete interaction - meaning you’re well You can also get a sense of the type of Twitter strategy that they are using you can draw inferences about. Do they respond quickly? Are they informal? Is there a particular type of day that they tweet?

You can get a sense of what positive tweets are being sent if you include a smile emoticon, :), with your query.

“@timClicks :)” returns messages like: @timClicks Thanks so much Tim. :-). Thankfully, there are no results for “@timClicks :(“.

Remember, that it’s possible to analyse competitors that are not even using Twitter. Not having a Twitter account doesn’t prevent people from tweeting about you. Experiment by searching for trade marks, company names or governments.

Use personal customer accounts

Search is great, but it doesn’t give you a full insight into a competitor’s use of Twitter. They might be sending great deals to selected followers via direct messages, for example. To find out, create an account and become their customer. Do not impersonate someone or indulge in deceptive conduct. Instead, make some genuine enquiries. Carry out a few purchases. Assess their response.

Some questions to think about:

• What is their tone?
• Do they attempt to move you to more orthodox channels?
• How much time are they investing in social media?

Your company needs to make the ethical decision about how far to take this strategy. It’s plausible that you could create accounts in many target demographics to interact with everyone in your industry. This is ultimately very close to breaching Twitter’s rules. However, as long as you are being genuine, it is highly likely that you will be able to gain large quantities of information about how your industry interacts with new media.

How could the Left come back this year?

I’ve noticed lots of angst in New Zealand’s Left. I don’t agree with it all. However, I’m really concerned that the next Parliament will be close to dysfunctional with lots of splinter parties. A strong Opposition will be vital to ensuring that the powers have recently been granted to the executive for Christchurch’s recovery are limited.

I haven’t heard hear firm policy consensus on how to respond. Last night, I jotted down a few things that the left would need to exploit if it wants to win this year’s election:

Some big-ticket items:

• National builds prisons, we build schools
• A vote for National is a vote for the far-right / Brash
• A vote for us is not a vote for Hone Harawira
• We will add democracy to CERA
• We will keep your home well insulated

Lesser things to target specific demographics:

• We will not cut off your Internet
• No road user charges for electric vehicles
• All new roads must include full cycle lane unless there is a strong reason not to
• Provide a packet of seeds with native plants, rather than a standard leaflet
• Foreign policy for New Zealand’s interests, not USA’s
• Adherence to our flexible, adaptable unwritten constitution

I think that they should generally stay away from Working for Families and interest-free student loans. These are big pain points, but they’re expensive & New Zealand doesn’t want to become poor.

Also, the minimum wage really does seem too high. It’s keeping young workers out of the workforce. Very high youth unemployment will damage our country for decades. This is a hard one for the Left though, because lowering of the minimum wage seems like a punch in the mouth to workers.

Lastly, one of the political parties should think of a way to reconnect with Britain. This may sound silly at first, but the Monarchy could be a very important lever. While colonialism has been difficult for New Zealand, it’s also brought the rule of law, enduring symbols of nationhood, democracy, international access & wealth.