Sharpcast versus Picasa
Curiously, after reading about the Picasa upgrade, a related article about photo management software popped up in Google Reader, courtesy of Robert Scoble's excellent link blog.
Robert Scoble had published a couple of podcasts featuring a product demo and an interview with Gibu Thomas, CEO of Sharpcast. Sharpcast is yet another photo management software tool and appears to offer a number of advantages over Picasa:
- Unlimited free storage
- Automatic synchronisation between PC and Web albums
- Original images are preserved
The unlimited storage seems too good to be true and is very useful because, at some point in the near future, I am likely to exceed Picasa's storage limit unless Google follow suit.
Secondly, if I ever edit an image or perform any housekeeping, I will have to manually replicate those changes to Picasa Web Albums. As I am very lazy, that is unlikely to happen.
Finally, I have always presumed that Flickr and Picasa are compressing the images to degrade the quality of my professional photographs to save space and bandwidth. However, that is fine as you get what you pay for and I am paying nothing. Obviously, it is preferable to have the original, unmodified image available without having to continually burn another CD/DVD.
So I signed up for Sharpcast, downloaded the desktop software and quickly synchronised the 'My Pictures' folder to the server.
Sharpcast was very fast and easy to use. I was able to synchronise and upload 1,062 photos with a single click. This took less time than uploading the same content from Picasa. Although you can upload multiple albums in Picasa, one album is uploaded at at time and the remainder are queued.
Sharpcast is a genuine competitor to Flickr and Picasa and in the podcast, Gibu talks about extending the range of files to include documents. Sharpcast also includes support for Mac users and mobile phones.
My only reservation is that Sharpcast really does seem too good to be true. I am also a little hazy about the business model. It is not clear if this is Web 2.0 beta software which will subsequently charge or whether Sharpcast will attempt to make money from additional services. Currently the only paid service is photo printing.
Web 2.0 - am I infected ?
- You use ELM on a VT220.
- You use Emacs and Gnus.
- Corporate standards force you to use Microsoft Outlook and you don't even mind.
- You use Gmail for all work and personal email.
Documents
- Quill and parchment.
- XEmacs.
- Microsoft Word with 37 macros.
- Microsoft Excel for all documents .
- Google Documents for all correspondence.
Newsgroups
- What are newsgroups ?
- You use Emacs and Gnus.
- Your company doesn't run an NNTP server for security reasons.
- Newsgroups are just another data source mashed into your aggregator.
Home Page
- Blank - just like your mind.
- SourceForge
- Personalised Google home page.
- Multiple Firefox tabs that take 4 mins to initialise.
Browser
- Lynx on an amber VT220.
- Emacs and W3
- IE 6.0
- IE 7.0 - feverishly hunting for the File menu.
- Firefox 3.0 (alpha)
O/S
- Ubuntu Linux with self-modified device drivers for wireless support on an old 386.
- Emacs.
- Windows XP - to provide technical support to all your relatives.
- OS X because all your trendy Mac friends can't be wrong.
- Vista because you really do need to manage all those photos of your cat.
Social networking tools
- Five-a-side followed by the pub.
- Emacs mailing lists.
- You are a fan of Ajax but only to clean the sink.
- You have gold membership on Flickr.
- You spend more on Skype than your landline.
- A 'mash-up' is when you play with your food.
- You finally book an appointment with your GP about your 'long tail'.
- You think TechCrunch is a breakfast creal.
- You think 'First Tuesday' is an investigative TV program hosted by Trevor McDonald.
Blogging platform
- Large text file in Emacs.
- Embryonic, unused corporate Wiki.
- Blogger Beta (101 Oracle bloggers can't be wrong).
- Hosted WordPress with Snap plugin.
- Self-hosted WordPress with custom theme and 347 useless plugins.
- Irritating tendency to send humourous 3MB attachments on a Friday afternoon to colleagues, friends and family.
- Wooden crate in corner of Hyde Park.
Employment
- You have 10 years service for a large IT company and a silver pen to prove it.
- You are a successful, highly paid company director, err, well a mercenary Oracle contractor.
- You demand money to mind visiting fans' cars at the City of Manchester Stadium.
- You have founded four failed startups but, undeterred, are contemplating the next.
Answers: Mainly 1 - you are stuck in an 80's timewarp. Mainly 2 - you probably have a beard and may well be Richard Stallman. Mainly 3 - you are a technology luddite. Mainly 4 - you are a Web 2.0 officiando. Mainly 5 - you count Matt Mullenweg and Robert Scoble as close friends.
bedroom antics with the wife
Last night, I happened to catch my wife composing an email. I noticed that when she sent a personal email to her friends, she invariably typed 'From Norma' as the subject line. This just seemed really weird to me. I asked her what she thought of the 'semantic web' and whether she had given any thought to adding tags to her personal emails such as 'Norma' and 'From' to help build a valuable taxonomy for her friends. She looked at me blankly and said 'Just because you work with computers, you think you're so clever, don't you ?'WTF
Despite occasionally enjoying this site and subscribing to this Oracle focussed offshoot, I always laid awake at night, endlessly tossing and turning, wondering what this curious and cryptic acronym WTF stood for. I need wonder no more. Technorati have finally put me out of my misery. WTF actually stands for 'Where's The Fire ?' My immediate reaction was 'WTF ?' No wonder Technorati killed that product at birth.example of Zoho sheet
People never ask me:'Norman - why don't you post a pretty Zoho chart of your blog posting frequency by month ?'
