B. Mann Consulting

Flow-based organizations can grow an archive with microblogging

bmann — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:49:57 +0000

My friend James at AdHack introduced me to the concept of Archive vs. Flow:

The web works in two ’states’ (for lack of a better word): flow and archive.

Flow: all the new content coming onto the web and its parsing, aggregation, recombination, etc. For short, consider this the new stuff. New blog posts. New Twitter tweets. New YouTube videos. Access is by RSS, browsing, email, IM, alerts.

Archive: all the content that’s no longer new but is still accessible and indexed for retrieval. For short, this is the culmination of not-new stuff. Old stuff organized and accessed by tags, categories, searches and links.

Most folks only get the archive aspect of the web once they’ve used it and managed websites for a number of years. It’s a little counterintuitive and different from all other media types.

Flow is short-term candy to fire people up. Archive is long-term value that ages and improves over time.

Once I started thinking like this - about content and experiences as Archive or Flow (or a combination, of course, if done right), it has permeated my thinking.

More recently, I've been thinking about organizations and their activities using this same model. And how many traditional, broadcast media organizations are all flow. They don't even *think* about archive. And this is epitomized by what I think is the very basis for all web-based Archive concepts: the permalink. If your piece of content, your experience, does not have a permalink, there is precious little I can do with it (including find my way back to it).

Two examples of media organization that are pretty much all flow: TV and radio (especially the news and/or local versions). Neither have permalinks in their "native" format. Their companion websites are slowly evolving some archive functionality, but it's not very good. Even worse, their websites do a bad job of showcasing the inherent flow nature of the organization and the content they serve.

Hulu is an example of a TV-related website that is starting to provide a great archive functionality. More like this, please!

Other TV sites do have some clips after the fact, and ways to link to them, but these are divorced from the native medium. You have to remember to go back to the website, somehow find the piece of content you were watching, and even then you might not have a permalink (think hour long clips, mini clips, or mystery meat javascript navigation that doesn't let you link directly to items).

Radio is the example that I think is:

in the most dire need of showcasing the "flow" nature of their content on their companion website and
has done a terrible job of doing anything to grow an archive that, as James says, has "long-term value that ages and improves over time".

A counter example is actually CBC Radio - they're growing an archive at a furious rate for most of their shows in the form of podcasts and interactive shows like Spark that blur radio and web and interactivity. But, I think the local "news" radio doesn't do nearly as good a job of moving from flow to archive on the web, arguably where it is the most important. The produced "shows" just happen to currently be broadcast over the air - but they are discrete chunks of content that can probably be better delivered via the web.

Last.FM is an example of a site that is tangentially related to this discussion, at least as regards music. They turn your "flow" of music listening into your own personal archive. And it grows richer over time. Radio doesn't do this for you, even on their own website. You can't favourite a song, or share it, or tell other people to tune in to a particular frequency RIGHT NOW if they want to hear it. It probably should.

So, how do flow-based organizations grow an archive? I think the prime example of native flow tools on the web today are all based on microblogging: Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook status messages. By looking at these native flow tools, media organizations can do several things at the same time:

Leverage the flow based, real time nature of their content and business - every item from their native medium becomes the basis for a microblog post coming from their own brand.
Build interactivity around this web-based flow version. What if your radio or TV station tweeted back at you? What if it used hashtag #traffic? or #news? or #contest?
Use all of this activity to automatically create permalinks which can be shared, rated, commented and in general, grow value over time. Since every microblog has a permalink "for free", there's the basis of your archive. Layer on other tools to remix, analyze, mashup, and visualize the depth of your archive over time.

Oh, and you probably shouldn't cede all of this great archive content exclusively to Twitter or any other third party network. Like cross-posting to YouTube, you definitely want to reach the audience on Twitter (and Facebook, and so on), but you first want to post to your "own" microblog. How do you get your microblogging network? I'm glad you asked!

There are a number of tools evolving to support the Open Micro Blogging standard that will let a number of different sites all talk to each other. This means that platforms like Drupal or WordPress can easily support implementations of microblogging.

More simply, Laconi.ca is an open source project designed to be a turnkey microblogging platform. The biggest single example is the Identi.ca site, and a good example of a community using it is Leo Laporte's TWiT Army. Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca / Identi.ca recently shared with me that he's also working on a fully hosted option. Watch status.net to keep up to date with that option.

Much of the growth of the web has come from its Archive nature, rooted in the permalink and being able to instantly get back to a single piece of content. Google and Wikipedia are two prime examples of this. Flow and real time are more recent entrants, but they are making the web grow even faster ^[1].

How is your flow based organization going to participate in both?

^[1] Blogging is perhaps unique in that it embodies both Archive and Flow at the same time. We just never noticed its Flow aspect because interaction and "newness" spread out over hours or days rather than the minutes or seconds we can visually see with microblogging.

Social media is…

bmann — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:12:52 +0000

…cake. Sort of. John Ounpuu made an interesting comment the other day that I re-tweeted:

Social is not a new type of icing. It's a new way of thinking about your cake.

I then got a number of good responses. From Travis:

Actually, social is a new way of deciding what to make -- as Marie Antoinette found, the people might not want to eat cake.

And then from Justin:

Social is a cake fight. Everyone has a cake, and they're all throwing it at each other and trying to dodge.

Fun stuff, and a good excuse to make a summary blog post.

Drupal out of the box: let's make a community

bmann — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:55:04 +0000

First off, I need to apologize to @webchick for being called away from the Drupal BoF at Open Web Vancouver last night. It was great to have her here to do a run through with @chx1975 of where we're at with Drupal 7. I was around just long enough to once again raise the issue of what the default install profile will do.

We've come quite far in major core improvements, but we don't have a story for what Drupal is when you do a default install. What should Drupal do "out of the box"?

There is a placeholder issue for this now: #483987 Decide on direction for default install profile. As I've seen the UX process continue, I still see us focusing on building and constructing. The changes there have been excellent, but I think we're missing an opportunity to have a truly great out of the box experience. My codename for this is "drupaloob".

The first step is deciding the story for this. WordPress is a blog. We are not a blog. We are a multi user system. Can we turn on a minimal OOB experience that showcases some of our multi user and other strengths? In the words of President Obama, "Yes We Can!"

My personal opinion and outline for this is that we should ship with a "Community in a Box". I've documented it on groups.drupal.org. Regardless of the details of comments on or off, promoted by default, and other finer points, here is my user story for this Community in a Box:

A community site with front page articles, a community blogging section, discussion forums, and shared image galleries.

Anyone is welcome to sign up for an account and participate in the forums. After some time in the forums, users are invited to become contributors, and can post blog posts and photos, as well as submit unpublished articles.

The blogging functionality is a community multi user blog. It is not meant as one users blog, but rather a large community that can post quick thoughts responding to each other and sharing their ideas. (Note: this is in here because people get confused about "blog" functionality -- this is meant to highlight that having a community blog is not the same as a single user blog, so don't expect to be able to change titles and designs etc. -- your blog posts are in a shared, community space)

Editors are around and police the forums, as well as reviewing and publishing articles and other material for the front page.

The photo galleries are shared galleries: like the forum and the community blogs, users upload them to share, rather than in their own space. There are weekly suggestions for new gallery categories, and users can also tag photos with whatever they like to mix and match how the photos are grouped.

While I'm piling wishes on top of dreams, I'd even like to use the wizard that has been in core since Drupal 6 to make several parts of this OOB experience optional. That is, right at the beginning, users would have two options.

One would be to do an "express install" that would install everything with the defaults as I've outlined above.

The second would be to engage the wizard and answer a series of questions and options:

Do you want forums? yes/no
Do you want a community blog for contributors? yes/no
Do you want a community photo gallery? yes/no etc.

What do you think? What would you want people to experience when they first install Drupal 7? Edit the wiki, leave comments, or create some patches against default.profile.

Questions for Backbone Magazine - Fixing a stale web site

bmann — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:33:47 +0000

Back in September 2008 I got contacted by Backbone Magazine to answer a couple of questions about, well, corporate websites and business usage of the web in general. I forgot all about it, until my friend Laura in Ottawa was reading it and saw my name. It's apparently in the current issue (which I haven't seen the print version of). It's on the site as "Fixing a stale web site", by Andrew Rideout. Below are the original questions and my answers. I've added a few notes in parentheses and added links to things.

1. What specific things do you think separate a good corporate website from a bad one?

Not built in heavy amounts of Flash - Flash is also essentially invisible to Google, so you're not doing yourself any favours here
On the front page, have a way for people to stay in touch - that means subscribe by email AND an RSS feed
Don't use stock clip art of smiling diverse people - if you MUST use such stock photos, then buy the rights so those same people don't show up on other websites hawking other businesses

2. What type of applications or coding languages are out there that you think are underused by traditional business or SMBs?

We're currently undergoing a dramatic shift. In the past, the entire web has been composed of individual, static pages, that a third party web designer or PR agency would manually update on behalf of the company. Today, every single page is being shifted to run on top of a content management or blogging system. Every page has interactivity and personalization. We're still at the very start of this phenomenon. (NOTE: I have lots more to say on this, but I haven't boiled it down into an article yet) (BM: I still haven't written this article :P)

The other shift is the use of many distributed online services. As I mention in the doing more with less section below, there are many applications you can now access online. Take this a step further and think about what parts of your business you can outsource or distribute. One company I was talking to was thinking of working with stay at home book keepers in PEI to process bills and accounting overnight in time for west coast clients to access first thing in the morning. Another company dramatically reduced the size of their office to mainly a customer and company meeting space, gave everyone laptops, and had a happier, more productive team that had the flexibility to work from everywhere. (BM: the former company is QCDocs, the latter company is Aaron Gladstone's team at 2Paths)

3. What three things do you think every company's website needs to accomplish?

Communicate
Engage
Sell!

4. Can you name a web element or application that irritates the piss out of you every time you see it?

Autoplaying music. Enough said.

5. Seeing as though start-ups more often than not have to do more with less, what type of things do you think traditional businesses could learn from web start-ups?

Spending time on web-based / digital media and marketing has a much lower cost (or rather, a much higher ROI) than offline PR. And it can also serve two purposes: connecting with customers and potentially helping you define your product / service through that interaction.

As well, there are a host of web-based services that range from free to low monthly costs that can replace expensive internal IT investment, or just work better and more simply than a roll your own solution. Everything from shared calendars and document collaboration (Google Calendar & Docs) to invoicing (Freshbooks) can easily be setup and used securely from anywhere you have an Internet connection.

If you're a small business, you could even consider that expensive self-hosted website that you pay someone else to maintain, and switch to a hosted blog solution like WordPress or Bryght (BM - this was September 2008, before Bryght, er … went away).

One tool that I've been falling in love with more and more is Get Satisfaction. It's a hosted service that lets you run a space for customer feedback and problem resolution. (BM: another really awesome tool that both Mobify and Strutta use is Tender for support / feedback / knowledgebase)

6. If a company has an e-mail newsletter, how can they make it stand out from the rest of the crap that piles up in people's inboxes?

Archive it! Every piece of content you create should be available as a separate piece of content on your website, with its own unique URL. This will allow you to build up more content over time, which is great for natural search engine ranking that will make it easier for people to find you / your product online.
Publish to the web first: allow "subscribe by email", but publish articles, how tos, customer case studies and other material to your website directly. It's a single point of contact that people can come back to.
Natural tone: just like people are allergic to "PR speak" in traditional press releases, many newsletters can suffer from the same thing. The advent of social media like blogging has led to a much more natural tone, that people respond to.

7. What type of small things do you find enterprises and SMB's generally overlook when putting together their sites?

Websites are not something you redo every 2 years. They are a major channel for engagement. What is the #1 hit for phrases related to your business? To your business name itself? Design for search as well as for "human" visitors.

Give ways to give feedback -- if you don't provide a place for it, someone else will, and it's better to control / monitor / be aware of that feedback.

Back to the "websites are not a project that finishes". Always be thinking of what you can do to improve your web channel. And actively track metrics related to it. If you can't sell directly through the web, track where your leads / hits are coming from. How many contacts through your "web channel" turn into either positive PR or an actual sale?

Open Web Vancouver, Open Restaurants, Open Data

bmann — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:19:59 +0000

I got notice this weekend that my talk submission to Open Web Vancouver 2009 got accepted.

Open Web Vancouver runs June 11th and 12th and the brand new Vancouver Convention Center, and registration is now open.

Here's the blurb from the registration page:

This year's conference promises to be at least as exciting as last year's. So far we have an exciting speaker roster confirmed, including keynote sessions with Rickard Falvinge, leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, and Angela 'webchick' Byron, Drupal 7 co-maintainer and Lullabot. Other confirmed speakers include:

Chris Messina ( OAuth / Citizen Agency )

Jacob Applebaum ( Tor )

David Ascher ( Mozilla Messenging )

Evan Prodromou ( identi.ca )

(BTW Open Web Van peeps - I'm tagging this #owv09, please post this somewhere as the "official" tag)

I posted my talk submission to the Open Restaurants wiki. What's Open Restaurants? Well, it's the namespace for that Semantic Web Community Barn Raising that I blogged about a while back. We had our breakfast meeting, 8 people came, and we've got a great cross section of Drupal devs, Freebase / semweb schema nerds, open data policy enthusiasts, and NLP experts that want to use Twitter posts to create Skynet :P

I said namespace, because we'll go about creating some schemas and hopefully bootstrap local communities, web apps, and other producers / consumers to adopt this schema and use it to build interesting things. I have some ideas about doing supply chain modeling for a Farmfed project that Anthony at Farmstead Wines has gotten me roped into.

I joked about the codename for the mashup we're going to create being called BaconPatioBeer. Except, the more I thought about it … the more I liked it and couldn't find another URL that seemed perfect. Hence, http://baconpatiobeer.com (which currently redirects to the Open Restaurants wiki). There'll be a blog up, soon~ish. Oh, look, there's this Twitter account, too @openrestaurants

I'm excited about getting the chance to work together with a group of people exploring Linked Data concepts directly. The "open data" part is also fascinating, and it looks like we'll actually get a chance to speak to Vancouver's city council in support of the concept - nice work, Karen.

So it looks like the "food for robots" phrase that I suggested at Drupalcon is becoming literal, since we're starting with food-related data. In fact, the Lullabots posted an audio interview of me talking Drupal + Semantic Web. I, uh, haven't gotten up the nerve to listen to it yet -- it was during the day of my all nighter, and I kind of remember looking up into space and monologuing. For more on Semantic Web/RDF in Drupal, try the next interview with Stéphane Corlosquet.

TweetLens is the Google Reader of Twitter clients

bmann — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:18:33 +0000

TweetLens is a web-based Twitter client. Built by Benson Wong aka @mostlygeek here in Vancouver, I find myself using it to browse my main account when I want to catch up on reading. Note that it is most definitely in alpha, and that you do need to enter your Twitter user / pass to login. I expect Ben to implement OAuth real soon :P

I use twhirl as my main desktop client, open to multiple accounts and with all notifications turned off except for @ replies and direct messages. This means that most of the time, the posts of the people that I follow just kind of scroll by in the background, and I only switch to it when I have something to post. This means that I don't actually read the majority of posts (sorry...but I *do* notice all mentions of @bmann); scrolling backwards through the twhirl interface (while new stuff is still coming in) doesn't work that well ... and, I'm really just scrolling, not really reading.

I think you could call TweetLens the Google Reader of Twitter clients. It has keyboard shortcuts for reading through and acting on posts. Like Google Reader, I can hit spacebar and "close" individual posts, visually indicating that I have actually read something. Like I said, I find this super useful when I'm taking the time to actually sit and "catch up" on reading through posts. I use twibble on my Nokia phone on the go, and just like Google Reader, it would be great if a mobile version of TweetLens saved my read / unread state.

When Ben first told me he was building a web-based Twitter client, I thought he was more than a bit crazy. But, I do find TweetLens interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing it evolve. It's very much in alpha right now, and Ben is actively working on it, so expect some bugs or outages at times. See Google Code for the issues / features list, and follow @tweetlens for updates.

MicroPlaza shows you links from people you follow on Twitter

bmann — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:49:13 +0000

I don't know that I can give a *really* short description of MicroPlaza that does it justice, but I'll start by saying that it takes the links - short or otherwise - that the people you follow in Twitter post, and creates thumbnails out of them. MicroPlaza supports OAuth, so you can connect your Twitter account to it without giving away your Twitter password. You login and it shows you all the posts from the people that you follow that contain links. It also shows you any other Twitter posts that also link to that same item. You'll note from the screenshot below that multiple short URLs are being used, but MicroPlaza follows them all and figures out that they refer to the same page:

As I overlaid onto the image, @lauras is the person I follow on that list - MicroPlaza has included the rest of the people because they've pointed to the same thing Laura has.

Since it only includes Twitter posts with links, it's like a high intensity stream of information goodness. I very rarely go to the website, choosing instead to subscribe to an RSS feed of my public timeline. I first found out about MicroPlaza when Roland started sharing MicroPlaza entries in Google Reader - there was good stuff being shared, and the screenshot of the web page (plus the full title of the linked to page instead of just another short URL) made it easy to decide if the whole thing was worth reading. The commentary of all the people linking to the item makes for even more context.

With bookmarks (and including a javascript bookmarklet to "add to Microplaza"), MP also can replace Delicious or other link bookmarking services. You can then go back to your bookmarks and see all of the people that have ever posted a Twitter item linking to that URL. While I have a Delicious account, I stopped using it when Google Reader added the Note in Reader bookmarklet functionality. I'm not feeling comfortable enough with Microplaza to switch to its bookmarks (maybe when it imports Delicious?), but seeing the stream of high quality links I'm getting from it, I have high hopes.

Lastly there are tribes, where you can set up your own (private) groups of people in whatever orderings you want. For example, I created a Bootup Labs Tribe for the people and companies that are related to startups and entrepeneurism. This then groups the same links you're already seeing into these arbitrary groups. You do need to be following the accounts you want to group, since MicroPlaza has to have access through your own Twitter account. MicroPlaza is also creating its own public tribes, such as @topopensource, which follows a number of people and then lets you see the top open source links.

The FAQ has more info, including that MicroPlaza grew out of Knowledge Plaza, an enterprise product. The company behind both is called the Whatever Company and is based out of Belgium.

You'll need to follow @microplaza to get an invite code, or request one from me (@bmann). I'd love to hear your thoughts on your experience with MicroPlaza.

Trying out Nokia Sports Tracker

bmann — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:18:53 +0000

I finally tried out Nokia Sports Tracker. Here's a screenshot of my workout:

Yes, screenshot. Nokia, in their ever loving wisdom, don't have embeds. You can download a version of your "workout" in KML, but you can't embed your route. Update added this suggestion to Get Satisfaction.

This is a really interesting service that works well - it's got a great S60 app for your phone with various different modes, and pretty much updates your location in real time both on a map on your phone, as well as beaming it online.

The one issue is that it absolutely *drained* the battery on my N95. We actually spent 6 hours biking around for the Vancouver Bike the Blossoms event, and it would have been great to have a log of the whole event. I charged the phone the night before, so I have no idea why it got so completely drained. Oh, right, and there are the usual Nokia-can't-really-make-web-apps issues, like the fact that I can't share a link to a map of the Vancouver area, showing that there are a dozen or so people using it in this area.

My other comment to Nokia is that if you called this GPS tracker or location tracker rather than Sports Tracker, then a lot more people would use it. I'm tempted to keep it turned on most of the time, just to see GPS tracks of my travels, especially with photos embedded on top of the trip.

You should be able to download the Sports Tracker app from the "Downloads" catalog on your Nokia phone (make sure you get the newest version). It will be easier to set up a Nokia Account (whatever that is) and *then* a Sports Tracker account from your web browser, and then you can enter the Sports Tracker account username / pass into the app on your phone. Mine are the same, since I couldn't figure out a reason why I would want them to be different?

Semantic Web Community Barn Raising in Vancouver

bmann — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:08:43 +0000

Or, how I got a tasted of Linked Data and wanted more.

I've been noodling about with a variety of semantic web / open data concepts for some time. Most recently, I spoke at Drupalcon DC 2009 on Practical Semantic Web (and why you should care). There's a video of the presentation embedded in that last link, and the presentation is available on SlideShare.

I think I can explain things even more simply: we can place a simple piece of data on a web page - like an address, or marking something as a person. From those source pieces of data, we can link it to ever more pieces of information. Except, instead of just "bare links", these links carry meaning, creating a richer web of content. In my presentation, I used the phrase "RDF is food for robots" - a way to share more info about the visible, human readable information that is already there.

From my point of view, that's already cool enough. But it's still not very *practical*. Why should you care, today? That leads me to open data, in general. The Dev Seed guys in DC have a great example of this in their StumbleSafely site -- it mashes up bars in Washington DC with crime statistics, cross-referenced with time for day, night, and evening data.

We don't have anything like this in Vancouver. What we do have is some interesting data that is beginning to be gathered in Freebase, and more specifically in the Vancouver-specific corner of it, known as vanbase. Looking at the StumbleSafely application, and thinking about some data that I hate to see duplicated over and over again, I came up with the idea of restaurants, and extra information about them.

The concept: patios, beer, and breakfast. Wouldn't you like to know where the best patios, beer, and breakfast restaurants are in Vancouver? So, in the morning, the site will show strips of bacon highlighting breakfast places. As it gets later in the day, umbrellas will pop open on the map, showcasing patios. Later at night, as the site goes dark, glowing beer steins appear, showcasing great beers on tap around the city. Through linked data, we can go on to surf the mass of information about brands of beer.

There are dozens of restaurant sites, in various stages of overlap. None of them share data, and they're not really about data in any case -- they succeed or fail because of SEO, or because of user features on their sites. And anyone can get the data -- pay a couple of thousand and you can get all the restaurants across Canada.

Linked Open Data is all about having shared information sources and building value on top of them, through those linkages.

The concept will be to fill in vanbase with restaurant information, starting with this list of Vancouver restaurants. Then we'll work with a Drupal (and possibly other) front end to do display of this rich semantic web data in different interesting ways. Why Drupal? It's got a really great set of semantic web tech already implemented, and can then show how an out of the box CMS can participate in a web of linked data. But hopefully (since this is also about open data) we can get other front ends to the data, or even have some of these existing restaurant sites contribute their data sets to Freebase.

Now, all that is quite a lot to think about and do. I started the title of this post by calling it a Semantic Web Community Barn Raising - I hope to see many people locally get involved in everything from data entry, to development, to design in building out a semantic data set, and then showcasing what we can do with it.

So, I'm calling an initial brainstorming meeting this Thursday morning over breakfast, 8:30am at Deacon's Corner. Here's an event entry on UQ Events to help you remember. @notmatt, @dale42, and @jimpick will be there, hope to see some of you as well. For more info, check out the Google Site SemWeb Restaurants, where we'll be posting notes and ideas as the project progresses.

Web apps should let me "Bring my own storage"

bmann — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:18:58 +0000

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 was realizing this as I was looking at the pricing plan for Huddle (which is project management sorta like Basecamp):

Storage seems to be one of the major items of differentiation. But I *know* what the "floor" of pricing is: It's 10¢ / GB. So the actual cost, from left to right, is 10¢, 25¢, $1, $2. OK, OK -- a few handful of cents more for bandwidth transfer, but it comes down to ... not much. So, dear web app provider, please don't over value the storage you are so graciously marking up in price.

And in fact, offering document storage in your web app is actually a *pain in the a$$*. You have files on your desktop, you have files attached to certain messages in Basecamp, in you have file revisioning (or whatever) in web app X. It's the forwarding documents over email problem all over - which is the newest copy, where is the file, who can edit the original, etc. Let me give you an example.

At work, we're happy users of Batchblue's Batchbook - it's CRM a bit like 37 Signals' Highrise, with some niceties. One of the things you can do is forward email into it, including with attachments, and it will sit in there. So, a workflow where someone sends you a presentation, that you'd like attached / organized with that person, works really nicely. Except, when I want to actually read that presentation, I have to download it to my computer, and read it there. Every other person in my work group that wants to read it? Also has to separately and manually download it. Same goes for editing. Download, edit, re-upload.

So, we stick that document in Dropbox. And it gets synced automatically, and everyone has it on their desktop, easy to read in full binary document format, be it Word, Powerpoint, or whatever. And everyone can add notes, or edit it as needed. That's how I expect seamless cloud storage / document sharing to work.

Here's my call to action:

When you're designing your next web app, please allow me to enter my existing Amazon S3 or Dropbox account as part of setup.

Call it "Bring your own Storage", and lower your prices appropriately.

P.S. Of course, there is a Dropbox API module for Drupal already.