Storm in the Cloud

I must confess I’d pretty much forgotten about the T-Mobile Sidekick. Some time ago, it seemed to be popular with the younger set as a texting and communication toy – I vaguely recollect my daughter telling me she wanted one, but iPhones and other cool devices consigned the Sidekick lust to history.

A while ago, the maker of the SideKick, Danger Technologies, was purchased by Microsoft and that’s the last I heard of it.

Until this weekend; when it was announced that Microsoft/Danger had gone and lost a lot of their user’s data while trying to complete a network upgrade.

The Sidekick is actually a clever little device – it is a cellphone with a slide-out keyboard that basically acts as a dumb terminal for applications hosted on Danger’s servers, it’s a cloud computing device that’s been around since before the term was fashionable. All the user’s data such as contact lists, text messages etc, is also stored on those servers.

Cloud computing has been around a while now and is growing rapidly. Until now, the biggest objections to the concept seem to have been related to privacy concerns and downtime. I don’t think anyone seriously thought cloud computing providers would just lose all the data.

Now that the unthinkable has actually happened (whoever would have thought that Microsoft of all organizations wouldn’t take the trouble to have a proper backup plan?) I thought it would make sense to look at my own exposure to the cloud and what I can do to make sure my stuff is safe.

There are a number of cloud computing companies that have some of my files.

Google:
Gmail – I’m a big user and have a ton of information stored there. I’d hate to lose all of this and currently take care of Google to take good care of my data. A copy of all my WordPress database backups live in Gmail as attachments.

Google Docs – I use this for a number of tasks including a lot of our business marketing files. I do have a lot of these files on local computers

Google Calendar – my life is run from here, but I also have local backups by syncing with Outlook.

Amazon
All of the finished photo images from our wedding photo business are hosted by SmugMug which in turn keeps them on the Amazon S3 service. There have been a few outages with the system – more of an inconvenience than anything. Until this week it had not occurred to me that there was a risk of all this being lost.

Todledoo
I have a fair bit of information stored in my Todledoo  account, mainly notes and tasks to complete. On the whole this isn’t critical for me, just as well since Todledoo uses servers at Rackspace which for some reason has never provided me the warm and fuzzies.

LiveDrive.
Now this one does worry me because I don’t know enough about this company to have real confidence that my data is safe. I became a LiveDrive client when it became clear GDrive wasn’t coming anytime soon and I wanted big online stoage.

I have a lot of data backed up there, RAW images from my wedding shoots, archived images, my music files, my “MyDocs” folder, WordPress database and file backups.

On the face of it, LiveDrive offers a nice unlimited on-line storage solution at a great price. However it isn’t always available and looking in their forums shows a lot of unhappy customers. Some of the advertised service, such as being able to use LiveDrive as my iTunes folder just don’t work at all.

For the photo business, LiveDrive is convenient, but everything is backed up in a couple more places. like I say, I really don’t have the confidence that the company will be there in the long term.

You might think I’m am idiot for using LiveDrive if I’m uncertain of the service (you might be right), but I do only use it for backup, not as primary storage.

Mozy
A while ago I opened an account here (mainly because EMC is a company I’d totally trust with my data storage). Problem with Mozy is that it is backup rather than storage – if a file is removed from my hard drive it’s removed from the Mozy drive too (after a bit of a delay) which is not really what I wanted.

I still have the acocunt – because it is cheap – and files are backed up everyday. I jsut don’t know which ones. I probably should pay more attention.

Tracking and Traceability.
Two of the software companies we work with, BellHawk and Mobia have a cloud computing model for keeping track of clients assets and other items. While there are certainly some big advantages in a client not needing a huge IT infrastructure, I don’t know where these guys are hosting the data or how safe it is.

Of all the companies, other than Mozy, the one I trust the most is Google. Well, I least I trust them not to lose my data, I fully expect them to ransack it for useful things they can use to help their advertising. Come to think of it, I would have trusted Microsoft as well – shows how little I know.

What about you? Do you have a big reliance on cloud computing and data storage? Has the Microsoft/Danger fiasco changed how you use these services?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting frustrated with the various Twitter clients that use Adobe Air. These include Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Mixero.

All have a lot of really nice features, but I’m finding that they just want too big a share of my system resources and when I want to close them I have to often go into into Windows Task Manager to get them to go away. Clearly an alternative approach would be well worth testing.

I tried the Seesmic browser based solution for a while, but I never fell in love with it. I then tried out HootSuite.

The HootSuite team promote their solution as a professional Twitter tool and I must say it has a lot of features that I really like.

Just like the desktop applications, HootSuite lets me set up columns for what I want to keep track of. I’m not sure what the limit is, but it seems I can set up plenty. HootSuite allows me to save any search as a column and also organize sets of columns into tabs – very nice. It also allows groups of users to be set up, although I haven’t used this feature yet.

Clicking on a user’s link brings up a nice little profile window.  From here I can send a message to the person, follow or unfollow them and click on links to their website. As you can see from Henie’s profile, there is some useful information and if I wanted to I could click over to her Twitter profile page or check out more of her recent Tweets – nice!

As you would expect from a modern Twitter client, HootSuite handles multiple accounts and also multiple users for the different accounts – this makes it a good tool for corporate Twitter accounts where more than one person might be Tweeting.

A feature I really like is the ability to set the time when Tweets are sent.

This is really useful for me when I’m updating our @LabelingNews account. I like to spend 30 minutes or so first thing in the morning finding interesting stories related to labeling, barcoding, RFID or data collection that I can link to in Tweets. Before I used HootSuite I had to send the Tweets during that 30 minutes period, before most people in my industry are even at work. With HootSuite I can time the Tweets to be sent at different times of the day – much better. I’m also helped by the fact that HootSuite is the first Twitter client (including the Twitter site itself) that isn’t blocked by our I-Prism Internet annoyance appliance.

Yet another aspect of HootSuite I’m enjoying is being able to embed a HootSuite column into other sites. For example, my Twitter feed on the homepage of this site is a HootSuite column where I searched on my username @-djh.

I set up an additional HootSuite embedded column on the Labeling News site. I love the way I can use some of these ideas to bring content from my various on-line locations together.

A feature that is important to Twitter users is URL shortening. No-one wants to use too many of their precious 140 characters posting long links so there are a lot of shorteners around. The HootsSuite guys have their own: ol.ly which does it pretty good job and also provides some decent statistics. The thing I don’t like about it is that ow.ly links open in a HootSuite branded frame rather than going straight to the url.

Since I personally prefer bit.ly (and the new even shorter j.mp) I tend not to use the HootSuite links.

Other features I don’t use are the ability to upload files and photos. I prefer to use Posterous for this job, but I’m sure the HootSuite alternative works well for those that want to use it.

So, as you can see there are a ton of great features in HootSuite. I had played with ver1 a while ago without really liking it, but ver2 does just about everything I need for a Twitter tool.

It would be great if it would support Facebook like the desktop apps and I’d love to see HootSuite support bit.ly or j.mp – since they developed their own system, I can’t see this happening though.

Do you use HootSuite or have you tried it out? What is your favorite way to communicate via Twitter?

Tweetdeck Screenshot

Unlike Danny Brown, I use my mobile Twitter apps alot – at least as much if not more than my desktop ones. For a while now, my mobile application of choice has been Tweetie which I wrote about here. I was therefore very interested when I discovered that a Tweetdeck application was going to be released and I downloaded from the Apple App Store as soon as I could.

I’ve been using Tweetdeck for iPhone for a few days now so I thought it would be a good time to collect my thoughts.

The great thing with Tweetdeck for iPhone is that some of the features of the desktop version have come over to the iPhone platform. For me one of the top ones is that the concept of using different columns for searches has been retained. This is fantastic and even better, the iPhone and the desktop versions can be synchronised so that the same column structure can be used on multiple PCs as well as the iPhone. I love this.

It is simple to scroll through the different columns by either swiping the screen or by using the left/righ arrows at the bottom.

Columns Implimentation

One feature with the columns I really like is that each can be set up with it’s own refresh time. One thing I plan on using Tweetdeck for is keeping up with #chats – this is something that has been next to impossible on the iPhone until now. I’m thinking that the search columns of Tweetdeck, combined with the new iPhone copy/paste feature is going to work out really well.

Like Tweetie, Tweetdeck can handle multiple Twitter accounts, a feature I use often for my work and personal accounts.

So there are a lot of great features, but what could be improved?

Well, the first is crashes. When I first installed Tweetdeck it crashed on me every few minutes. The app comes with a Growl feature that shows the number of updates for each of the columns. Switching this off has largely solved the crash problem, but it does happen every now and again. I’m not worried – a lot of first iterations of iPhone apps seem to have this problem which gets solved as the code is refined in future updates.

My other main problem is with the colours. Unlike Tweetie which offers several screen colour options, Tweetdeck has just the one you see here and I’m not a fan. I’m hoping that the next update will give me the option to invert the colour scheme – I like to use a white background during the day and the dark would be fine for nighttime reading.

There are also a couple of missing features I’d love to see included – Trending topics and a local feature.

But I must say, for a first release is a very complete and usable application. I must confess that I tend to go back to Tweetie quite often, but I’m using Tweetdeck a lot of the time and enjoying it a lot. Nice job!

One thing I like about the WordPress platform is that it is easy to use various types of media. I already have video and audio on the Totally Incorrect site and I plan on using more of each.

Thanks to the nice guys at riffly.com, I can now include a new level of interactivity. Riffly allows me to include the ability for you to leave audio or webcam comments on the stories – you are not just limited to text any longer.

I think this is a really cool idea and I’ve already left some audio comments on some other blogs.

Do you have a blog of your own? If you do you might want to consider using this service as well. The basic service is free and more advanced plans can be purchased for a monthly subscription.

What do you think? Is this level of interactivity something you would use?