Syncplicity

Syncplicity is a new web service designed to let you sync files between computers via an easy-to-use desktop client program. The service also lets you access the files from a web browser if you are away from your computer. In many ways, Syncplicity is very much like Microsoft’s FolderShare or the pay service SugarSync.

However, Syncplicity offers one features those two do not - it can also be used to upload files to online services like Google Docs and Facebook.

In addition, the service is designed to not only be a way to keep files synced up, but also a way to implement hassle-free online backups.

Don’t be fooled though - although the service is free for now - that’s just to hook you. Their plan is to eventually charge a fee, possibly in the range of $20/month. Argh.

Call me cheap, but I hate having to pay for online storage. Storage is so cheap, I wish there was a way that it didn’t have to cost so darned much.

Still, for those of you with money to burn and critical files looking for an easy way to sync and back them up, Syncplicity is worth a look.

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When I first went to the web site at compfight I wasn’t impressed. I don’t what the deal is, but in Firefox, it looked like I had actually accessed the mobilized version instead of the real web site. The text is so small, it’s practically unreadable!

But then I saw Martin’s review of compfight and decided to give it another shot.

Ignoring the issue of text size, I entered a search term and was pleased to get back a whole bunch of search results…fast. That was nice!

But unfortunately, its best feature - the ability to search commercial, creative commons only, or both, is hard to utilize as are the options to turn on or off safe search or the ability to seek the original photo.

My complaint is that these features are toggled by clicking on the words, but my cursor doesn’t change indicating that these were links. Plus, if I’m toggling these options, why do I also need to check the checkbox to turn on the filter? This makes no sense to me.

Maybe these are a minor complaints for some, but in addition to the microscopic text, it just speaks to the overall usability and design of the site being very weak.

So, while the site performs searches quite well, it’s just not the best tool for the job. However, if they would hire a UI designer to spruce things up, they could really have a great service on their hands.

This is a guest post by Grand Effect Network blogger Corvida of SheGeeks.

I know you’d probably like to point out the dot that’s in the middle of "Overheard" and "it" in my headline. Too bad you can’t. However, you can head over to Overheard.it a web service that eavesdrops on Twitter.
     

A Sidebar Creative web service, Overheard.it gives you a space to post what you may have overheard somewhere and you’d like the world to know about. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be something you overheard directly on Twitter! Getting on the homepage of Overheard.it is pretty simple and easy to do in 3 steps:

1. Have a public (unprotected) Twitter account (don’t you always?)
2. Follow @overheard
3. Start a twitter message (tweet) with "OH:" or "overheard"

From there, the service uses Tweetscan and Terraminds, two of the most popular and efficient search engines for Twitter, to find your tweets and pull it into Overheard.it. According to the site:

If you’re not following Overheard on Twitter, it can take 10 to 15 minutes before the tweet gets included.

If you follow Overheard then the time to get included should be within 2 minutes.

So the sooner you follow, the sooner they can get your tweets. I’ve always personally wondered why people put "OH:" in front of their tweets. This could be the reason, though if it is, I wish they would’ve told me sooner!

I was going to stay out of this one because I feel like I’ve already voiced my opinion on it, but then found I just couldn’t resist: the weekend’s bitchmeme was fractured commenting in the blogosphere. On Deep Jive Interests Tony started the conversation by getting riled up over Shyftr after Matthew wondered if it crossed a line, Louis Gray pushed the meme forward, and then Scoble said bloggers have lost control. Numerous others had their say too.

Louis linked to my article on Read Write Web: "Why Blog Commets Still Matter" in his post, but I really think it was this article where I began my initial freak-out: "The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere."

On that post, I listed all the places where the conversation had moved to, including, of course, FriendFeed (this was pre-Wordpress plugin days). But most importantly, I detailed how you could keep up with all the conversations no matter where they were (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, FF, MySpace, etc.). Good point of reference if you’re looking for tools.

I also again rehashed things here: "More on the Blogosphere’s Diluted Conversation."

Since this was all a few weeks ago, I didn’t think I had anything new to add to the discussion, which is why I was going to let this one just pass me by.

But then, I saw this comment on Scoble’s blog, where Louis takes another viewpoint, asking:

"should I personally be annoyed that the discussion on this topic (which I, in theory, kicked off) is taking place on Scoble’s blog? :-)"

Obviously, the smiley shows he’s kidding, but I realized then that we, as bloggers, myself included, sometimes have a sense of ownership or entitlement to the conversations we start. Should I be annoyed that I started this conversation weeks ago, with not one but three blog posts, but it’s Scoble who gets the credit?, I asked myself.

Ultimately, the answer is no. Thoughts, opinions, and conversations don’t belong to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Just like I can’t stand the blog comments that go "I wrote about this on my blog last week," and then add nothing more, one can never claim to have started any conversation. Not really. Although I appreciate the link Louis gave me in his post, it wasn’t really necessary to give any sort of "credit," it’s only necessary to give "context."

That’s all links should be - context…not credit, not ownership.

We’re all getting too caught up in our links, our pageviews, our stats, and our traffic. We’re supposed to be bloggers, not businesses. If we write quality posts, all that stuff…it will come.

So, I know you were half-kidding in your comment there, Louis, but you made me think, so I answered you anyway.

I  just saw the new on Deep Jive Interests: AlertThingy has arrived! This Adobe AIR application lets you keep tabs on your FriendFeed, similar to how Twhirl lets you tweet and keep track of your tweets. The app also has a search box, so you find words, friends, etc. in your FF stream. When you first install AlertThingy, you have to get your remote key in order to authenticate against their server - a step I could have done without, but ultimately, not a big deal.

The app, version 1.0, is lacking in some of the FF features, like the ability to hide items, for example, and it doesn’t appear to have the skinning abilities that Twhirl does. You also can send your comments back as tweets - another bummer. However, having a FF desktop AIR app is really great, (so thanks Howard Baines!), and I’m sure more features will be added in time. In the meantime, though, I might just stick with the FF site itself.

Update: I see that my fellow Grand Effect blogger, Frederic, agrees with me on sticking with the web for now and Corvida thinks it wasn’t worth the wait.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make me happy - like the ability to skin my Firefox browser, for example. I’ve been enjoying the Personas for Firefox extension since it came out back in December of last year. The extension adds dynamic theming to Firefox, which lets you choose from a variety of built-in themes, like landscapes, cute Firefoxes, geometric shapes, and more.

Not too long ago, I discovered that Personas had been updated. Due to the nature of this particular extension, there was no auto-update feature, so I only found out about it by visiting the Mozilla Labs website.

The new version of Personas is a major update. This version offers dynamic Personas that can change over time (like my iGoogle page), a custom persona editor so you can make your own, and some other minor enhancements and bug fixes.

I didn’t see it mentioned, but after installing the update, when I hovered my mouse over a particular theme in the list of options, it would change to that theme in the browser, sort of like an auto-preview. It never did that for me before and it certainly is handy when you’re going through the themes trying to decide which one you want to use.

In addition, several new themes have been added, including an odd selection entitled "Mozilla Japan," which seems to have nothing to do with Mozilla at all. But that’s OK because my favorite theme collection (Foxkeh - aka cute Firefoxes) has been updated with even more scenes.

The Mozilla post about Personas also promises that soon there will be an online directory of personas which will make it easier to find new ones. In the meantime, you can find some new personas that developers are posting in the forums to supplement the ones that come with the extension.

If you want to download this add-on or update your version of Personas, you can get it from here.

For a while, I had the "Share This" button on my site, which, as you may know, pops-up a window linking to every gosh-darned social news and bookmarking service currently available. And you know what? I doubt if anyone ever used that thing. If people want to bookmark you, they will do so, and they probably have the bookmarklet or add-on they want to use already installed. And as for Digg, well, there’s no Digg-bait here, there never really is, so pleading for a Digg submission seems kind of pointless. The website Mixx, on the other hand, is going about delivering social news in a different way. Whether it succeeds or fails is yet to be seen, but I kind of like the little community they are building over there, even though I’ve questioned some of their ideas in the past. (It was more along the lines of "will this work?" than "this won’t work!", anyway). Now, I seriously doubt if any of my content makes it on Mixx, either, but the flare is just to show my support. So yeah, a little Mixx love for ya.

Tell me we’re not heading down a dangerous road: an article in today’s Guardian reports on how ISPs worldwide have turned into the police of the web, throttling, shifting, and killing packets left and right. In the U.S., Comcast has been in the news for their throttling of heavy BitTorrent users, but they are by no means the only ISP participating in this type of activity, and, if anything, the U.S. has the least problems in this area.

In Japan, for example, the four largest ISPs recently announced they would terminate the accounts of anyone that the "entertainment industry" claims is a repeat copyright offender. How do they know this info? The ISPs hand it over: IP address and all.

In Canada, the national telco, Bell Canda, is dropping BitTorrent packets left and right - and not just those from their customers, either. They’re dropping the packets generated by other ISPs, too.

In the UK, regulators are considering a "3 strikes, you’re out" rule for copyright infringers.

And the EU is pushing through legislation whose penalties would include permanent bans on doing business, seizure of assets, criminal records, and fines of up to €100,000.

Now, somebody tell me since when was it the responsibility of ISPs to enforce the legality of the bits that pass through their pipes? Should they then, oh, say filter out illegal content of other sorts, too? Oh, no that would be censorship. Like China. That would be bad.

And why does the entertainment industry, in whatever country in the world, get to push their nose down into our tubes because they failed to come up with a sustainable business model for the digital age? It was not the fact that torrenting is easy (go ask your mom to try it) that has led to widespread pirating of music, movies, games, and other items, it was the lack of decent alternatives to finding this content in the digital form people wanted. The market auto-corrected.

Even now, pirating continues since every song isn’t available as a DRM-free file that can go from iPod to Zune to Rio to cell phone to PC to stereo and back again. But a torrent search reveals a ripped mp3 that does.

And all those people torrenting the latest Hollywood blockbuster? Trust me, when the movie is that good, they’ll be in theaters. Not everyone who torrented say, "Enchanted," would have paid full price to view it, you know. They were probably just insanely bored on a Saturday. If it wasn’t there to torrent, they would have found something else to do that day. They would have simply never watched the movie. And they would have never gone out to buy the DVD for their niece’s birthday later that year because they remembered that it wasn’t that bad after all.

Besides, why should we believe the MPAA about the pains of piracy when they intentionally lied to us? Back in ‘05 they claimed 44% of their "losses" were due to college pirating activities, which they later recanted, saying it was only 15%. Then they go and report record box office revenue. Oh, cry me a river.

And there is the issue of pirating vs. torrenting. Pirating may mean using BitTorrent, but it could also mean old-fashioned ways of making unauthorized copies. Burning a bunch of CDs, for example. But torrenting does NOT equal pirating. Linux distros are put out as torrents. Pando and NBC are teaming up to release TV shows via torrents on NBC Direct. Miro uses torrents.

So, I’d never thought I would say this, but thank god for Verizon. They’re actually introducing a new P2P protocol, P4P, to reduce backbone traffic and lower network operation costs just so they can continue operating without having to throttle traffic.

(Oh and, Verizon? Thanks for the the FIOS, it’s pretty sweet.)

As seen on Hacker News, this is flippin’ cool. And not because it’s a tiny little Super Mario game, but because everything is rendered with Javascript. OK, so it’s not even the whole level and stuff is missing, but seriously, Javascript, people, Javascript. That’s impressive.

Oh, I needed this! I’ve got MP3s and MP4s and WMAs and god knows what else filling up gigs of storage at my house, thanks to a little sneakernet-ing not to mention ripping nearly my entire CD collection to my PC. And even though both Windows Media Player, iTunes, and my copy of Media Monkey all check online databases to find the metadata for the tunes, none of them are 100% perfect and mistakes happen. Plus, for some reason, there are those songs that they just can’t identify. And when you’ve filled up an 80 GB hard drive with MP3s and are still growing, the more automation, the better.

So when I discovered TagScanner, a free download that can help me organize my music, I was thrilled. The program can import tag info from freedb.org, Amazon, or TrackType.org, plus you can have it auto-generate tags from files and folders or rename your files based on tag info. The program supports tons of file types too, including:

MP3, OGG, Musepack, Monkey Audio, FLAC, AAC, OptimFROG, SPEEX, WavePack, TrueAudio, WMA, MP4 audio files

as well as

ID3 1.0/1.1/1.2/2/2.3/2.4, APE v1 and v2, WMA, MP4, and Vortbis tags, comments, and metadata.

Now I haven’t tested this out yet (this looks like a weekend project for me), but I’m hoping this will be the app that finally gets my library in shape.