The PutPlace Blog

We are trying to decide whether to backport our new Mac client to the older version of the Mac (Tiger). Tell us what you use in the poll below.

Here at PutPlace, we were looking for ways to keep an eye on the technology blogger zeitgeist. Obviously there’s Digg, Hacker News and the like, but we wanted to gather a big aggregated feed of the top tech bloggers.

Fortunately, Henry from TechCrunch assembled a big list of the top 100 tech bloggers. We spent a few hours going through that list and gathering as many FriendFeed subscriptions and RSS feeds based on the list. Generally, if we found a FriendFeed, uh, feed for somebody, we assumed that would cover the blogs they wrote and so forth.

We assembled them into three OPML files:

• Only FriendFeed feeds
• Just tech blog feeds
• The whole shebang–all of the feeds in one OPML file

Why are there not 100 feeds in the third file? Because a lot of the FriendFeeds replicate a lot of the top blog feeds, and we saw no point in including them twice.

We’re not exactly sure what to do with all this data–any suggestions? Maybe a big river of news somewhere that interested readers can, you know, swim in?

While working on this little project, we discovered two other sources of similar data:

• Techmeme’s firehose feed
• Alltop’s Frienderati page

So we have been in public beta for a few weeks and I regularly get asked, What does PutPlace do?

We talk about three things in our tag line,

• Secure
• Organise
• Share

What I’d like to do is take you through some of the features around these areas in the next few blog posts.

This first one is about securing your content.

Now secure is pretty straightforward, we’ll take your files and put them somewhere safe. Safety for most people means "make me a copy and put it out of harms way".  Safety also touches on privacy (nobody else should be able to see these files) and access (except my family). 

But how do you know a copy is backed up, what about old versions, where are the other copies? PutPlace will backup every version of your file and because we track changes in realtime we backup in realtime as well. So each time you change that CV you get a new copy linked to the old copy on PutPlace.

lets see that in action. Here’s my CV directory, that I’ve added to PutPlace.

Now if  I edit the file CV Joe Drumgoole.doc  you will see it uploading.

Every time you save a copy of the file we will upload the changed file to the server.

Now you can go to the server see the file online.

See how all the revisions are stored. Nice. That will happen for every version of a file you create.

Things that we know we have to add,

• The ability to turn off versioning for a file and/or a directory
• The ability set a limit on the number of versions
• A way to look a the space overhead of the versions across a directory vs the cost of the latest revisions

We think this is a pretty good start to file security.

PutPlace is running a fun little photo contest about data loss. It’s called “Pull a Face for PutPlace”. Here’s the spiel:

Show us your data loss disaster face!

• Dropped ravioli on the new computer drive?
• Forgot where you stored the video files of baby’s first steps?
• Frustrated by uploading 1 file to multiple sites?
• 10 years of data gone in an instant?
  

Enter a photo of your data disaster face for a chance to win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. 

We’ve all had that terrifying moment where we forgot to save that term paper, budget report or what-have-you. Or, even worse, when your hard drive just up and quits. Channel that energy and focus it into a JPEG.

Damien hits another home run for Startups in Ireland with his Tuesday Push idea. What I love about it was the speed of execution. Met Damien last week at the Darklight Festival, he mentioned the idea (which I whole heartedly endorsed), couple of emails over the weekend to confirm with other key figures that it was a runner. tThe very next Tuesday and we are up and running.

Damien is a exemplar of the “lets not overthink this one” model of working.

PutPlace has experienced a dramatic spike in traffic as a result and the link love is sure to stand us in good stead in the future. So in no particular order, a big shout out to,

• Damien Mulley : That PutPlace Feeling
• Conor O’Neill : PutPlace is backup for the rest of us
• James Corbett : When Push Comes to Shove
• David Kelly : PutPlace Beta and The Tuesday Push
• Robin Blandford : Push PutPlace. Push Ireland.
• Keith Bohanna : The Tuesday Push - PutPlace
• Niall Larkin : Get your sh1t together with PutPlace
• Pat Phelan : PutPlace gets the Tuesday Love
• Alexia Golez : Saving Your Digital Life with PutPlace
• Frank Bauer : What Can you Put in PutPlace
• Alan O’Rourke : PutPlace
• Derek Organ : PutPlace, Easy online backup
• Conor O’Neill (on Web 2 Ireland) : The Tuesday Push, Show Real Community Spirit

If I have missed anyone (these are the sites that Google Alerts reported for PutPlace) please drop me a line or post a comment and I’ll add you to the list.

Its official, we are now in public beta. What does this mean? Well right now if you are a Windows user you can register and download our client software. With our software in place you can backup all the content on all the computers your own.

Big job? Not with PutPlace. We do all the heavy lifting and our client is smart about backup so you don’t have to be. Duplicate files are detected by the client so we don’t scarf up all your bandwidth uploading redundant files. On the server all those copies are linked together so you don’t pay out top dollar for storage either.

Once we’ve backed up all your stuff we watch it in real-time and backup all the changes as they happen. What about old versions? We keep ‘em all safe for you online.

Need all your bandwidth or CPU? Turn PutPlace down or turn it off. When we startup again we’ll catch up to where we were in a lickety split.

Upload as much as you want the beta is free. When we move to a paying model in the future we’ll give beta users several months to decide whether to go with PutPlace or somebody else and we’ll move your content there for free (if we can).

So get uploading and send us your feedback.

We’re delighted to host OpenCoffee here at the Digital Depot on James St. Hope to see you all here on Thursday.

As avid users of Firefox, PutPlace is delighted to help sponsor the FireFox 3 Dublin launch party alongside Blacknight, Segala, Wubud and BT.

The venue is CineWorld on Parnell St, Date 19th June 2008, time 7.00pm to 1.00am.

Registration to attend is required. Over 100 people have already registered so make sure you get your name on the list before it’s closed.

Apple announced MobileMe (hosted at me.com which cost them a reputed 11m dollars) at their recent World Wide Developers Conference, aka WWDC for those in the know. The full details are now available on the Apple.com website.

So what is MobileMe? Well its contacts, email and calendar synchronization all wrapped up in a Nice big Apple bow and priced at $99 dollars a year. They also lob in a fancy schmancy Web 2.0 AJAX interface to email, contacts and calendar (take that Google!) and 20GB of virtual storage “in the cloud” as they are fond of saying.

Its clear they are gunning for the Outlook/Exchange users, they even pitch it as Exchange for the rest of us. Do most Outlook users know what Exchange is? I guess this is the WWDC.

So our takeaway is being Apple its sure to be as a slick as a race car, but the price tag makes Google Mail and Google Calendar look pretty attractive. I guess a lot of the CrackBerry addicts will swoon while their companies pick up the price tag.

But this is a new departure for Apple, they don’t have a lot of experience building web scale services and you can be sure that the Mac users will sign up in droves. Google can always throw their hands up and say its free when gmail glitches, but when you are stiffing your users for 99 bucks a year taking out North America’s email plonks you right in the center of class action territory. I do love the fact that they are socialising pay to play services as that is certainly our business model here at PutPlace.

I’ve signed up for the launch and look forward to giving it a spin for real. Time to buy that iPhone I’ve been lusting after.

While PutPlace has a different take on backing up your digital life, there’s no denying that we’re in the online storage space. As such, we’re always keeping an eye on what other players are doing.

In the process of our research, we compiled a big spreadsheet that records, among other things, how much free storage space each service offers. We thought we’d share it with the world, in case you needed to store, like, every episode of The Simpsons online.

A few caveats: we ignored email services like Gmail, and any service that offered less than 250 MB of free storage. We found two services that offer theoretically unlimited storage. However, MediaFire limits file size to 100 MB per upload, and Omemo applies a peer-to-peer storage model that seems pretty complicated for the average Normal Human user.

For the record, here at PutPlace we offer 2 GB for free. Sign up now to join our exclusive beta program.

With no further ado, here’s the big list:

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