Good luck with that!

So I stumbled upon this post from 2008, trying to determine if an idea I have is original. It’s funny, my intent is actually to exploit email servers as a source of unlimited cloud storage (by writing a simple app that will make the SAVE and OPEN functions transparent), without violating TOS.

Sorry, it just seems funny given the context of the article.

Wikis are great but I noticed that they are still scary for lusers. Most of them still have markup language of sorts that may be scary (despite how easy it might be) and must be understood before they can be used efficiently.

@vacri – oh man, that would drive me nuts. I mean it is perfectly logical, but it would annoy the shit out of me every time no matter how I tried to rationalize it. LOL

But it’s true – I’m always amazed on how users find “innovative” ways to use technology. I guess we are just wired differently. When I want to do something I first consider an appropriate tool. I think “what would be the best piece of software to accomplish this?” – sometimes I even do some research before I start the task. This is because I want to have the right tool – even if I have to learn how to use it first. I know that this initial investment of time and effort will pay off in the long run as it will improve my productivity and make the work more pleasant and convenient for me.

I think that a thought process of an average luser goes along the lines of “what tool that I already know could accomplish this”. And since the only tools they know are Outlook, Word, Excel and “The Internet” (which I recently found out is a synonym for Internet Explorer) they end up inventing very creative ways of doing things.

Yes, the offline accessibility is not too good… ;-) lol
But it is more efficient because your document is in only one “physical place”.

On the topic of ‘lusers using tech “incorrectly”‘, I remember one tech writer talking about how his tech-naïve wife ‘incorrectly’ saved text files – she’d open a new mail in her mail client, write the text she wanted to save, then go to File > Save As… and save it as a text file.

Then the guy realised this way was more efficient – she always had her email client open, and his intuitively ‘correct’ way was to go through the start menu to open up an app and the overhead involved in that. Given that both methods have the same result, he concluded that we shouldn’t dismiss the naïfs out-of-hand.

On the wiki thing – love them, especially for troubleshooting documentation. They update much more readily than a static doc and are more navigable. The only downside is that they’re not as accessible offline.

I am guilty of doing the same (e-mailing to myself) too. I do use Google Docs (but it is limited to certain types of documents and is not as straightforward as other Google apps). But when I want to very quickly save something between work, laptop, home PC and girlfriend home PC, I used to send it on YahooMail or GMail. It was fast and simple.

And then I discovered Wikis. And I don’t do it any more. When I want to share something (anything) between various PCs, I use Confluence (the Wiki wich is used by our company and also turned into a document management system). It is faster and easier than e-mailing to myself, and it is designed for that.

On the subject of file backup, sharing and storage …

Online backup is becoming common these days. It is estimated that 70-75% of all PC’s will be connected to online backup services with in the next decade.

Thousands of online backup companies exist, from one guy operating in his apartment to fortune 500 companies.

Choosing the best online backup company will be very confusing and difficult. One website I find very helpful in making a decision to pick an online backup company is:

http://www.BackupReview.info

This site lists more than 400 online backup companies in its directory and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.

http://www.puremango.co.uk/cm_gdrive_109.php

This is what I used as my base, then was building off that.

I used to have a script on my site which I was customizing to work as a google mail storage device, it would upload files (with a tag so you could then filter them if you wanted to use your primary email for the storage) and then it would list out all the files that you uploaded, there was no folder views or anything, it was fairly straight forward:
Sign In -> Upload File -> Retrieve File

Yup, running an ssh server at your house is another good solution, but it does require some know how. Also, I have yet to see an affordable dependable windows based ssh/sftp solution for windows.

I was looking at this more from the point of view of an average windows user. :P