I've written up Dropbox vs. Jungle Disk before, and then followed up with the concept of side loading - having software assets (purchased or otherwise) be moved from one online location to a cloud storage location owned by you.

The guys at Jungle Disk are looking to add features to their service, asking people to vote between public/private file sharing, multi-computer sync, and network drive offline access. Since this is exactly what I use Dropbox for (I use Jungle Disk for backup and long term archive), I really would love to see them add all three.

Dropbox still only has two downsides for me. First, it's reselling Amazon S3 storage to me at a premium, and I resent that. Secondly, because of it's sync model, I have to have enough room for all my files on every computer I enable it. I'm storing all my files in the cloud so I don't *have* to have unlimited storage. Like ZumoDrive does, there should be some smart caching to keep some stuff local, and make all of it available when needed.

I can't really blame Dropbox - they're doing the same thing countless other web app companies are doing. Amazon S3 is one of the biggest, cheapest, and most reliable options out there. Joyent's BingoDisk, Rackspace's CloudFS, and Nirvanix are three examples of somewhat equivalent offerings with slightly differing price points, so let's assume those are included in the concept of reselling cloud storage. But here's the thing I realized, and posted on Twitter the other day:

Lots of online apps differentiate pricing based on storage. I'd much rather they didn't offer storage, and let me plugin S3 / Dropbox / etc.

I recently wrote about Dropbox vs. Jungle Disk. I'm a happy user of both. In the last little while, people have also talked about Microsoft's LiveMesh, plus ZumoDrive.

Reactions to LiveMesh have been mixed - it's clear they're still working on the service, and it's not as smooth as some of the others.

ZumoDrive is very very very close to DropBox ... except it does some interesting things with not actually having to have all your files on disk. This is pretty amazing, since it delivers on the promise of an expandable, infinite drive. Ewan at Mobile Industry Review thinks that ZumoDrive "is going to change EVERYTHING" -- I disagree only in that I don't think a clear winner can be identified at this point: each separate startup brings new features and new business model tweaks to the table. The comments on Ewan's post are great: lots of people thinking that cloud storage / storing stuff in the cloud is complete bollocks, and say so loudly, or that it's been done for years. I single out Ewan's post because he's thinking about the mobile angle on things. Already we require our desktop apps to have a web component, or to be able to sync with our mobile devices. We should demand the same from our storage.

What I'm more interested in is the concept of sideloading and pre-fetching as they relate to these continued innovations in cloud storage. Keep in mind that I'm going to take the liberty to come up with my own definitions, so let's start with those.

Sideloading: data is transferred from one Internet location directly to another Internet-hosted storage space rather than having to be downloaded to the user's / requester's desktop and then re-uploaded to some other storage space.

When you put it like that, moving bits onto your desktop just so that you can move them back up to the Internet is clearly a collosal waste. First, you are using constrained bandwidth. The bandwidth from one server to another is going to be much higher and more reliable than down whatever access pipe you have to your computer. Second, you are using double the bandwidth. Download it, then upload it.

Much like I can use PayPal or other forms of payment to make purchases that go direct from my bank account to another's, I should be able to make digital content requests that go directly into "my" cloud storage. Who will be the first to implement this on a broad scale? I've already seen Wesabe do something a bit like this with their Firefox plugin and bank statement downloads.

By the way, I came upon this use case because I use Valve's Steam and Direct2Drive game purchase / downloading servicse. I semi-regularly do 6GB downloads, use them to install, and then have to backup the "originals", which I usually archive on Jungle Disk. What a pain! Steam does this a bit better, because a download is an install, rather than the Direct2Drive 2 step process of downloading the installer, then installing. But, Steam still has the "backup game files" option -- you want to uninstall (perhaps to put on another machine), but you don't want to have to pay the "download penalty" of fetching all 6GB of files from the source server again.

I'll continue to use the Steam example to illustrate my next concept, pre-fetching.

Pre-fetching: like TiVo, using a client / service to trickle downloads in the background of digital content that you are likely to be interested in. You can then immediately use / activate / purchase digital content without having to wait for a download.

XBox 360 already does this, to a degree. You can choose to have all new content downloaded to your console automatically. This isn't yet done on a widespread scale on PCs, and could be applied to many forms of content. There used to be plugins and services that did this for webpages, back in the days of dial up. It doesn't make sense for content that is considered so small, but 6GB games or perhaps raw video footage are examples of the type of content where without a pre-fetch step, you could be waiting days to actually interact with content locally.

If anyone has examples of services that implement some of these concepts, I'd be interested in hearing about them.

I wrote a bit about Jungle Disk in passing. I am using it for personal archive and backup. It's been working great, and I decided to try out the Workgroup edition: you add additional accounts and can set permissions on different buckets / folders for each person / account. At $2 / account / month for the workgroup functionality, it's quite good.

Except, you have to get people to install and setup Jungle Disk (the download link for Workgroup is a bit hidden). And ... it's not Dropbox. I tried it for a bit, and it works as advertised, but you a) have to keep paying on a monthly basis and b) you have to do a fair bit of handholding and account management.

Then I tried Dropbox today. Easy. Amazing. Amazingly easy. And it does shared files, too. Share a folder, add some email addresses to invite people, and you've got synced folders / documents on multiple computers. The public stuff is actually easier ... there is a default folder called Public, and files in there you can right click on and get a publicly accessible link directly to.

Update: CAUTION! -- I didn't realize this, but according to Michael Tsai, Dropbox doesn't support resource forks on Mac OS X -- "If you use Dropbox, resource forks disappear, packages turn into folders and can no longer be double-clicked, etc. ". What this means is that some files will have issues. Basic files like Word docs and binaries shouldn't run into issues, but for applications, potentially Keynote files and others, your files may not work correctly any more.

Currently, there is a 2GB storage limit to the accounts (free). This also sits on Amazon S3, although on their account, not yours like Jungle Disk. Dropbox is offering a paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month, or $99 / year. Hmmm....2GB still seems enough for now...

I'll stick with the Jungle Disk Desktop edition for my backups and long term archives. I've paid the $20 for the Desktop edition and I can backup and store as much as I want on my own Amazon S3 account.

For multi user sharing of documents, Dropbox is just so much simpler. The low end pricing is cheaper than Jungle Disk (free!) while the high end of 50GB is cheaper with Jungle Disk (0.15/GB/month with S3 x 50GB = $7.50).

I think we're going to continue to see great innovation in better ways to share / sync / collaborate on files, in part driven by cheap, reliable, API-driven storage options like S3. Epd.io is a local Vancouver startup to keep an eye on...

Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P