So, this is a quick review, mostly because DropBox is getting Digged, TechCrunched and Redditted all at the same time — and I’m finally allowed to blog about it, as they’ve dropped their request they bloggers not do so. I’ve been in the private beta for almost two months now, and DropBox is pretty much as hyped: it is an awesome remote online “drive” solution.

While its features are not tremendously unique — you get gigabytes of storage, you can install a little program on your computer which auto-syncs so that a special folder “auto-syncs” with getdropbox, you can “share” different folders and files in a fairly granular fashion, and so on.

Rather, what really works for me is how simple and elegant it is.

{actually there is two other features that are also pretty nifty: how it keeps different versions of files every time they are changed, and its auto-gallery feature}

There are, in fact, many online solutions, but what sticks out about DropBox is that its interface is very clean, very fresh, very simple, and very fast. Unlike its competitors, the online interface isn’t trying to mimic your desktop, and as such, isn’t full of fancy AJAX (or Flash) tricks. It has a very simple interface, and its a joy to use.

This latter fact is important to me, because — and perhaps you’re like me — you bring data between computers of varying ages and processing speeds. AJAX and Flash are fine when you’ve got a relatively “new “machine, but in the places that I work (hospital), I’m often faced with old machines, or machines that have miniscule amounts of RAM, or computers that are just plain slow. Using other online storage solutions make no sense in this environment because they’re slow and cumbersome to use.

But this is where DropBox sails, as it requires very little of the host machine to work … which is just as it should be.

On the other hand, its not a perfect product by far. One thing about DropBox that needs work, for example, is the downloading interface. There is no easy way to download more than one file (if you’re at a remote machine and don’t want to install the remote “drive” on it), and obviously this is an important feature if DropBox is meant to be more than an archiving tool (which presupposes that you won’t be downloading much).

This feature can’t be all that difficult to implement, so I anticipate that its one of those things these guys are working on.

Bottom line: DropBox is pretty awesome and given its simple interface, very usable even in fairly primitive computing environments. I’ve been using it almost daily in the past two months, and its one of those services that goes above and beyond any superlatives that I’m going to use — and that you really just going to have to try for yourself.

Ok, so it need not be Digg, but really, all of the online social communities need to rally behind this poor guy, Chris Avenir, who is at a local Toronto university. The poor guy is facing expulsion and has already gotten a B grade turned into a failing grade in a first year chemistry course. Why? Because he administers a local Facebook group on some homework topics. Flabbergasted? I was. Turns out that said Toronto university, Ryerson, has a very liberal academic misconduct policy, which describes such as “any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, including actions that have a negative effect on the integrity of the learning environment.”

Obviously, as Michael Geist says, sharing answers or plagiarizing is an obvious academic offence. But virtual study groups?

Come on!

So, let’s review the major criteria for creating a movement to help a brother out on Digg.

• Dude is a geek* … check!
• Involves web 2.0 / social media / Linux / Gaming / Apple / technology / Facebook … check!
• Dude is wrongfully targeted because he is a geek and is using one of the above … check!
• Dude facing tragic / legal / funny / sad consequences of his actions … check!

Mr. Avenir clearly meets all of the major criteria to get some tech support / love (but not all minor criteria, which might also include, but is not limited to, posting for your favourite Democratic nominee, sending up some hilarious pictures referencing your 733tness / geek cred, and composing a top 10 list of Terribly Obvious Things).

Seriously — this issue needs to explode across the blogosphere, and folks like Corey Doctorow (of BoingBoing) — who is also a local Torontonian — need to step in, particularly if the worst does happen ( he gets expelled?!). The story, as its been reported, is an absolute anachronistic disaster, and I think Ryerson needs to step up and explain how things have gotten as far as it has, and reassure the city, its students, and the world at large (if their reputation means much), that it isn’t out of step with Progress and how important these new Teh Internets are.

Update: The Facebook group that Chris Avenir was a part of may have had a description that suggested that people were merely copying answers, and this was the thrust behind all of the drama above.  I think that it raises the larger issue of how legitimate it is to having “homework” or “assignments” to be done which “count”, and whose answers are easily copied, in this day and age.  As I wrote over at Mat Ingram’s blog, all this does is drive those seeking to trade in answers in the social “underground”, or via private online groups, and you’ll never find them.  Answers to old tests and exams are a part of university life, and academia has to rise to the challenge of this reality in 2008.  Hammering students into apparent submission, because they’re using existing tools to propagate a very old practice hardly seems fair, insightful, or forward-looking 

* not yet indepedently verified
** photo courtesy of SuperProm

So I had a chance to listen in on the Digg Town Hall today, which wasn’t quite the format I was expecting, as they fielded 20 questions that were sent to them (ordered by Diggs, naturally), rather than answer live question from the (virtual floor).

Nevertheless, what I got out of it was a few things:

1. Catching spam is a big priority: Digg is putting a lot of cash and resources into hiring people who can find algorithmic ways to tackle this stuff. And Kevin and Jay are keenly aware that the integrity of their site hinges on being able to catch spam — so much so that they self-censored themselves when trying to describe exactly how Digg promotes stuff, because they don’t want spammers using that information against Digg. One of the more interesting stories I heard was how one blog would pay a top Digger to submit stories — often good stories, quality stuff — have it promoted to the front page, and then weeks later, have that URL re-direct to another URL (or another page), thereby increasing traffic to that other page. Pretty crafty / black-hat stuff! Anyway, that’s just one example of the stuff they’re trying to fight off. Another one that they described was one enterprising guy hiring dozens (hundreds?) of people in eastern Europe (Romania?), and they caught the spamming as they were all from the same region (caught by IP address) which looked pretty suspicious.

2. They will never disclose their exit strategy: People ask them “all the time” whether Digg is going to get sold. They never talk about it, and probably never will talk about it. Rather, they want to invest their time into improving features with the site, such as the comments section and searching, and duplicate checking, which they readily admit, is something that they’re trying to fix.

3. Their emphasis is on improving Digg’s features — not its customer support: Ok, that’s not entirely true, because one of the things that’s coming in the pipeline (or so we’re told) is a forum of some kind for people to ask questions and have their questions answered; apparently there’s going to be two broad categories … one for general user type questions, and another for technical questions (how to get the Digg badge to work, and so on). What I actually mean is that there are a small but vocal (and important) group of Digg users, some of whom are considered the Digg elite (top Diggers, etc etc), who are pining for a way to get their emails answered in a personal, timely manner, about questions that probably have nothing to do with not understanding the FAQ. Questions around why people were banned, how they can get re-instated, blacklisting of URLs and the rationale for why that might be happening. These are all legitimate concerns, but it seems like Digg’s big focus is on features, and in spite of Jay’s reassurances (”we don’t just ban anyone; there’s a back and forth … a dialogue, before someone gets banned” for example), unconfirmed reports suggest that for many Diggers, that just hasn’t been their experience.

Other miscellania that I remember:

• There is no auto-bury function, rather just a sophisticated algorithm for judging which stories get promoted
• there is probably *as* a sophisticated function for burying just as their is for promoting
• “diversity” of people digging clearly has some importance (and weights each Digg differently, is what I got out of it). What diversity means exactly, they didn’t want to reveal.
• Kevin gets together with the guy from Delicious, and the other guy from Reddit (don’t know their names) to regularly commiserate over the never-ending battle between spammers, trying to game these social sites, and the kind of solutions they have to come up with to detect it, and then end it.
• There is only one guy “moderating” at any one time
• They don’t like to call him a moderator (they used another name, like “sys admin”, or something)
• They rely quite heavily on focus groups to help them decide which features suck, which ones they introduce, and to test new features.  There is a way to get into these groups, but by that time, either my own connection conked out, or they merely decided to pull the plug on the presentation.

The bottom line that I got out of it was they gave the appearance that they were trying to make Digg better — and that it takes time, and that they actually get most of the feedback that comes to them, positive and no.

Lastly, for the vocal Digger / social media crowd who are keen to get some better answers to their questions, unfortunately, while the mechanism that currently exists to get in touch with them is probably lacking (and sorely, from the sounds of some Diggers), its clear that this aspect of Digg isn’t something that’s a priority for them to fix — improving and adding new features to Digg is.

It’ll be interesting to see how that part of the debate evolves from townhall meeting, to townhall meeting.

More:

• Mat Ingram’s wrap up
• Social News Watch’s thoughts on the auto bury denial
• Mashable’s embeded Ustream of the entire Digg Town Hall
• CNet who thinks there was too much navel gazing

So I loves my news aggregators, and I loves my social news sites. You may have also heard of a new breed of such sites, which aggregate shared bookmarks via Google Reader (and more), such as readburner, linkriver, and rssmeme.

Anywhoo, I was about to wax poetic about how useful these new services are, when, upon closer examination, I realized that much of the stuff that was bookmarked and shared was quite similar … even the same, really.

Oh, sure. Smaller stories are different. Each community has its own idiosyncracies. But the big (and even medium sized) stories? All the same.

Right now I’m battling what seems like an evolving cold, so I’m not going to do any heavy lifting with respect to numbers, charts, graphs, and all manner of social geekery (but if you feel so inclined, please do so and then let me know) — but its just an observation.

I wonder, as all the field of social information-aggregating services mature, particularly in areas where this kind of thing started (tech / geek interests), if what we’re seeing in late 2007 and well into 2008 is the evolution and commodification of popular content.

That’s not to say that the information or content itself is a commodity, specifically, but that the sites themselves might begin to be.

Or, put another way, the stuff that is popular, and that is shared, gets shared so quickly between the various and sundry sites, it doesn’t really matter which site you go to. Unless your level of geekdom is extreme, and it matters to you how quickly you see stuff (in the order of minutes or hours), for the lay-geek — you know, who has a job, who goes to work, who has a family, and who can’t monitor this stuff as obsessively as they would like — I don’t think it *really* matters.

If I’m looking for old-ish kind of news (like 12-24h old — man, I can’t believe I just called news that was 12h old “old”), I can look to Blogrunner, Techmeme, Digg, Propeller, and one of those shared-bookmarking sites above, and you can bet the big stories will all be up there.

The implications?

That its tough for new sites to break into this ecosystem of shared / social news, as there is already a huge contingent of players looking for news (social news sites), or automated bots which are similarly crawling for said news (news aggregators), or scripts that are looking for people to share such information (social / shared bookmarking tools) — all of which, when they find something newsworthy, is thrown up on all of these sites in a variety of ways, overlapping each other within minutes or hours of each other.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds for Social News, but on a cold blustery Friday evening, I’m wondering if we’re at a stage where we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with few services really providing a breakthrough in this experience.

Contrary to what some believe, Newspond, the latest entry into the news aggregator scene, isn’t really teh awesome. Here’s the two second run down: it aggregators news, like Techmeme.  It allows you to comment, like Digg.

Sure, there’s a fancy Ajax-y kind of wrapper around it, and there’s a way to sort out stories that are popular amongst different time periods, amongst other things.

My two second take on it is that — you know, maybe for people with 30 inch displays, it works.  But for someone with an average 19 inch display, you just can’t absorb enough information at a glance.  The reason why Techmeme works for me (and Megite, and Blogrunner) is that they are all “no frills” in their appearance.  I get to see headlines — lots of headlines, organized and indented in such a way that I recognize at a *glance* the hierarchy of news {its also why I likes popurls}.

Could Techmeme learn a thing or three from Newspond?  Sure.  (Where’s that search function, Gabe?)

But is it revolutionary?  … to borrow a word from Newspond’s own lexicon — “meh”.  They’ll have to tighten up the design and usability up a few ratchets before I change that into a “yea”.