I had always been bemused by the bold-type claim on Divshare’s site that they would host unlimited amounts of my media online for free, forever.
Indications are they will come up a few trillion eons short of the goal.
In the ongoing debate concerning campus-hosted versus third-party applications and services, it’s worth keeping episodes like these in mind. I have loved using this service, and recommended it to countless people here at UBC and beyond. I hope I remembered to add my cautionary disclaimers about back-ups and keeping options open…
BTW, I was alerted to this by two friends on my Twitter feed, for those of you scoring that wonderful and flaky discussion space on the “completely useless?” scale.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some warning email to write.
This is being picky, but…
> BTW, I was alerted to this by two friends on my Twitter feed, for those of you scoring
Twitter gets a +1 not simply for being the carrier of a message, but only if it relayed to you a message that you would not otherwise have received.
Do you think you would not have heard about the problem at Divshare had it not been for Twitter?
there used to be an adage “if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t” (or something like that) – but it’s been pretty much ignored in the Web 2.0 ballyhoo… The only thing that might come close to “forever” online is archive.org – and even that is at the whim of its benefactors…
@Stephen — fair enough, I get your logic and this might not be the most compelling example. I probably would have heard about this failure somewhere else, though in the case of a service that might disappear with media, and warnings needed to be relayed, every bit of extra time counts. I’m not on my usual media diet today, so it might have been Monday or later before I found out.
I think I pointed to Twitter as well, because it was where I had recommended Divshare to someone, and received a warning from this same person later on.
Yea, it was me you recommended it to … I liked divshare a bit, but couldn’t get it to do what I needed it to do … give me a simple .mp3 link (well without paying that is).
That’s why it’s going down … it was unsuitable for MY needs … feel my wrath. 🙂
Alec, I only hope the power of your wrath extends to the Blue Bombers.
I really like blip.tv – http://blip.tv/walkthrough/
You can upload MP3s as well as videos, and it will generate an embed-able MP3 player as well as a link to the file itself.
Of course, I’ve almost found blip.tv a little too generous in its terms, and thus subject to the laws that D’Arcy describes. Then again, you can set blip.tv so that it will also send a backup to the Internet Archive.
I recommended this service after I saw its potential for UMW Blogs. I am glad to say there has been no uptake of it in the UMW community, otherwise my enthusiastic post would have me eating a lot of crow right about now. Thanks for the heads up, and if I was one of the people cheerleading this service, please slap me on the wrist so I don’t do this sort of thing too often.
hope? http://venturebeat.com/2007/11/25/divshare-says-its-for-sale-but-not-dead/
Preservation is a vast problem, teeming with complexity, and growing fast enough to leave a red shift in its wake. D’Arcy’s right about archive.org.
What can academia do? There’s a strong tendency for each campus to grow local storage.