Posts tagged Teaches
Megaupload Saga Teaches Painful Lessons About Cloud File Storage
Jan 20th
After yesterday’s dramatic, international sting operation, the people behind Megaupload are in custody, their Web empire and fancy cars having been seized by authorities. Founder Kim Dotcom and his associates are charged with piracy on a massive scale, among other things.
As for Megaupload.com, the site is inaccessible, perhaps indefinitely. That’s a bummer for the millions of people who used it to share copyrighted albums, movies and software. It’s an even bigger let down for users who used the service to store personal files, sometimes without a backup.
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While the site was indeed used for illegal activities, many uploaded their personal documents, work files and multimedia to the service, using it for remote access much like services like Dropbox and Box are used. After the shutdown, many users started complaining via Twitter that they were no longer able to access their files, as Torrent Freak reported.
It’s a painful lesson for those users, who may never see their files again. It’s also a reminder to the rest of those of us who use the Web everyday that online file storage is never a substitute for safely backing up data on a local hard drive, far away from the cloud. Granted, legitimate personal file storage services like Dropbox, YouSendIt and the countless online backup providers probably won’t get raided by the FBI, but that doesn’t mean some catastrophic event couldn’t result in downtime.
To some, it’s hard to have sympathy for people who thought Megaupload was a safe place to store personal files, especially given the controversial nature of the site. Yet for a lot of rank-and-file users of the Web, there is a certain inherent, blind trust given to Web-based services. They keep their email in the cloud, their calendars, their social contacts and activities. Seldom does anything disappear out of thin air. In the case of Megupload, the site offered premium accounts, which users paid for. Surely a service for which you shell out money couldn’t just disappear overnight. Could it?
Megaupload’s takedown may be on the more dramatic end of the “what if” scale, but there’s no guarantee other services won’t go down for any number of reasons. If backing up one’s local hard drive to an external device is a no brainer, doing the same for cloud-hosted data should be even more imperative.
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PostSecret App Teaches Beautiful Lessons About Privacy on the Web
Sep 9th
PostSecret, the beloved weekly blog that allows anyone to anonymously share a postcard containing a personal secret, has launched an iPhone app that expands the project out onto the social and mobile Web. In addition to viewing the regular Sunday Secrets – the physical postcards – featured on PostSecret.com, users can create and share digital secrets and browse them by time and location.
The idea of broadcasting your darkest secrets across the Internet might sound counter-intuitive, but the app does an amazing job of reassuring users of their privacy and security. Not only has PostSecret built a heartfelt, loving application, it has raised the privacy bar for app developers everywhere.
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Keeping a Secret
If you choose to save a list of your secrets on your phone, which you don’t have to do, it’s password-protected. You can connect to Facebook or Twitter to share links to interesting secrets you discover, but the social settings page reassures you that the services “are never connected in any way to secrets that you submit.” The introductory splash screen says that users’ identity, location and secrets will never be connected to one another. The app won’t even know your name.
The app was designed in partnership with Bonobo Labs, and it takes the familiar iPhone tropes for social photo apps and makes them its own.
An Intimate Experience
The navigation is familiar, but the textures and fonts are dark and soothing. The graphics are a lot to take in at first; the map view is especially hard to navigate and slow to respond. But this app extends the comfortable touch of the barebones Blogger-powered PostSecret website into an intimate touchscreen experience.
Another aspect of the PostSecret project enhanced by the app is commenting. On the weekly blog, Frank Warren, PostSecret’s creator, curates some email comments regarding individual secrets and inserts them between images, often setting up interesting – if artificial – dialogues. Now, with the app, readers can engage in threaded discussions on each secret, but comments are posted as their own secrets, with the app’s typography and one’s own chosen background image.
This app enables people to air their deepest secrets and share them with one another, but it still maintains a safe space.
Strength in Sharing Secrets
Warren has published the sites most beautiful secrets in books, and he speaks publicly about the power of the project. According to the blog, within 24 hours of its launch, the PostSecret app became the #1 best-selling App in the U.S. and Canada.
The app is available now in the iTunes store, and an Android version is coming soon.
Do you read PostSecret?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
PrivacyVille: Zynga’s New Game Teaches Users How to Play Secure
Jul 7th
Zynga does games. That is the company’s bread and butter. Zynga makes almost all of its money through Facebook. Facebook does not do privacy very well and often faces user backlash whenever privacy settings or options are changed. User backlash against Facebook is inherently bad for Zynga.
Zynga wants users to know that it cares about privacy despite what the Facebook mothership is doing. Hence, Zynga has released a new “game” designed to teach users all about how the social gaming company treats user information, where it is stored and how it is used. Say hello to PrivacyVille.
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Essentially, PrivacyVille is a cute guided tour through Zynga’s privacy settings. There is not much actual “playing” involved with this game. There is an incentive to learning about Zynga’s privacy policy as users can visit RewardVille to get zPoints.
“We think this is an important step in creating a recognizable interface to explain privacy, as opposed to the normal fine-print privacy statements you see on sites today. We want players to understand our policies, have fun while they learn about them, and most importantly, be incented to walk through the tutorial,” Zynga wrote in an email.
There is a touch of irony here, of course. Facebook and privacy do not usually occur in the same sentence, unless there is some type of negative connotation. That goes double for when third-party application developers are added to the mix. This is a good move by Zynga to give away game points to teach users about privacy. The entire tour through PrivacyVille takes about five minutes and then there are a couple questions to answer at the end (to make sure you actually read the information in the tour) before sending the user to RewardVille.
What do you think of Zynga’s attempt at transparency? Are you going to go get your zPoints by taking the PrivacyVille tour?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Wendy Suto, President of Search Circus, Teaches Facebook & Social Networking … – PR.com (press release)
Sep 3rd
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Wendy Suto, President of Search Circus, Teaches Facebook & Social Networking …
PR.com (press release) Wendy Suto, President and CEO of Search Circus, Inc., a Cleveland SEO and social media firm, recently taught local travel agents about Facebook and the … Heatherington Releases a New Book to Help Businesses Get Traction Online Facebook And Twitter – Social Media Optimization By InfintechDesigns |
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