Looks like your TOS grants you a perpetual all rights license to all content in the user's dropbox without any of the usual qualifications about only as far as it's needed to provide the service?
views.fm:
By providing any content to this web site: (a) you agree to grant the site editor a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive right and license (including any moral rights or other necessary rights.) to use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, distribute, perform, promote, archive, translate, and to create derivative works and compilations, in whole or in part. Such license will apply with respect to any form, media, technology already known at the time of provision or developed subsequently;
Dropbox:
By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.
We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space (again, only to provide the Services).
I assume that's a cut and paste job gone horribly wrong, but that is pretty gross.
I would imagine that a storage company would have something like that if they planned public/social features, such as an imgur for pix you're already storing with them.
Seconded. This book has made me rethink all of my behaviors and professional practices – from the gym, to food, drinking, and my UX design recommendations and reasoning. It provides a framework for how we make decisions, a truly phenomenal and amazing accomplishment, when you consider it.
It's not just business use alone that matters for Google, they are a complete productivity/life suite. Facebook fails miserably at this.
Enter the realm of Facebook and what do you accomplish, you add friends, like something, and look at photos, essentially nothing, a closed experience that ignores much of the internet as a whole delivered through an unusable interface (does anyone else feels like facebook has a b-rated windows 95 feel to it?). Seriously, try to find apps in Facebook vs. finding apps in Chrome Web Store. I understand the numbers behind it, but AOL was cool at one time too.
Google you have everything you need to help you be productive and useful. Amazing integration across all platforms, mobile phones, google docs, chat, news, reader(quit whining about the redesign) and discovery (google +, seriously video chat in hangouts thats pretty and easy to use, why do I need Citrix?). If your against the thought that google + can be successful and aide you in having a better social user experience online, then I'll let you get back your USWeekly and you can keep joining your "Kim Kardashian Support" groups on Facebook.
Google is the company that Microsoft failed(fails?) to be. Sure they don't make pretty iphones, but they make real, usable products.
This is a pretty good assessment. I could see G+ gaining traction as a work network a la yammer but that probably isn't a big enough prize for Google to bet the company on.
Dropbox's GUI does need some work for presentation, which is why me and a friend built an app on top of Dropbox precisely for that: views.fm Actually just released a new slideshow feature to present photos!
For designers: good for practice, bad for business
For businesses: good for unimportant stuff that needs a bit of design, bad for serious stuff
As a designer/business owner, I'm past the point of using this service and since my product is UX/design focused, I wouldn't dream of outsourcing design work in this way.
Oddly enough, the more I read the more I become convinced that this may actually not be the case. Technology and our ability to effectively process information is growing at an exponential rate – of course, so is the amount of information.
But logically, there will be a point in the future where the output of humanity in an hour will be greater than the sum total of all human knowledge prior to 2012. Some fans of the Mayan calendar say this date is December 21st, 2012. Kurzweil says more like 2045. Really hard to say, IMO. But still, if we have the power to create that kind of information then we'll have to be able to take in a lot more, so I'm not too worried about missing everything. I'm just concerned about the information pertinent to my health, career, and loved ones, which is quite readily available thanks to sites like this.
"...there will be a point in the future where the output of humanity in an hour will be greater than the sum total of all human knowledge prior to 2012"
How much of that output is celebrity gossip and tweets about coffee and coverage of gadgets that will soon be forgotten?
I'd say much of the "increase" is just us putting into writing the kind of daily chatter that ancient people didn't bother to write down. It just increases the noise-to-signal ratio for future historians.
Certainly you must be right that noise is increasing faster than signal, but signal is still growing massively if you look at research being done, etc.
Also, not to be ignored, as stated, is our ability to find knowledge is making the filtering process far better than before.
Sure, an ancient library didn't contain a lot of celebrity gossip, but good luck finding what you need amongst the available works - sans anything but the librarian's best remembrance of what a book contains and its value.
