Google Shared Storage

In 2007 Google added an option to pay for additional storage for Gmail and Picasa Web. The prices have changed since then: for $20/year you get 10 GB instead of 6 GB, for $75/year you get 40 GB from 25 GB, for $250/year you get 150 GB instead of 100 GB and $500/year is the price for 400 GB, up from 250 GB.

Google's offer doesn't look very good if you compare it with the storage offered by Yahoo Mail and Flickr. Yahoo Mail promises to offer " unlimited storage" if you don't abuse the system. "The purpose of unlimited mail isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by our anti-abuse measures."

Flickr is less generous: you can only upload 100 MB of photos each month if you have a free account. Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of storage for free, but a Flickr Pro account costs $25/year and you get "unlimited storage".

Google's offer would make sense if you could use the storage in a service like GDrive, but uploading photos and storing more attachments in Gmail is not enough. There's no defined limit for uploading videos at Google Video, but you need to pay if you want more than 1 GB of storage at Picasa Web Albums.

Google offers a way to purchase more storage space to use with some of its products (currently Gmail and Picasa Web Albums). This extra storage acts as overflow when you run out of free storage space in either product. If you've filled your free storage (5 7.2 GB and counting for Gmail or 1 GB for Picasa Web Albums), you'll automatically use your purchased space to store more pictures and messages up to your new storage limit.

Your shared storage space will be used by whatever product needs it. Picasa's free storage is for photos only, and Gmail's is just for Gmail messages, but the shared storage can be all photos, all messages, or a mix of both. You can't set aside shared storage space for one product - it will be used by any product that's over its free storage quota on a first-come, first-served basis.

Google Shared Stuff to Be Discontinued

Google Shared Stuff, the social bookmarking service that has never been officially launched, will no longer be available after the end of March.

Google Shared Stuff was only used to share videos at Google Video and Knol articles, but it was buggy and underdeveloped. Shared Stuff combined different ways to share pages with other people: by email, using social sites like del.icio.us or by adding them to a public page.


As usually, Google's suggestions for replacing the discontinued services are hilarious:

"If you want another way to share videos, you can use the "Share" link below each YouTube video. You can also create a public Google Site if you want to share websites and links with friends."

A more appropriate replacement is Google Reader's sharing bookmarklet, that lets you share content from any web page. There's also AddToAny, which combines multiple sharing options in a crowded page. Many other social sites offer sharing bookmarklets: Facebook, FriendFeed, del.icio.us.

{ Thanks, Jamie. }

Shared-nothing synchronous storage replication with DRBD… for Zarafa!

Last Friday and Saturday I had the pleasure of presenting DRBD-based high availability at the 2008 Zarafa Summer Camp. What’s this Zarafa thing, you ask? Here’s a quick introduction. Zarafa is a fully LAMP-based, drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange developed by a Delft, Netherlands-based company. Yes, that means that all those Windows desktop users out there can use their beloved Microsoft Outlook to connect to a full-fledged collaboration solution, including email, calendaring, cont

A Directory of Google Reader Shared Pages?

Google promotes on the homepage a site called " Power Readers in Politics", which lists the Google Reader shared pages for US political journalists and the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain.

"You can read what they read, and see what's on their minds as they share and discuss news. Each participant has created a reading list with a feed you can subscribe to in Reader (or any other feed reader), and is also publishing shared items," says Google Reader blog.

While the ad from Google's homepage is misleading ("read what Barack Obama and John McCain are reading with Google Reader"), the idea of grouping related Google Reader shared pages could be expanded. Users could choose if they want to add their shared pages to a directory categorized based on the items that are usually shared. Google Reader could show the number of subscribers for each shared page and might even recommend shared pages related to your current subscriptions.

Sites like ReadBurner and RSSmeme let you discover people that share interesting things, but I feel that Google Reader could greatly improve this process. Shared pages act like a filter: instead of subscribing to tens of blogs about the US elections, you can subscribe to 3-4 shared pages that summarize the most interesting news and debates.


Update: Here's my shared items page and the corresponding feed. I mostly use it share blog posts about Google or technology in general, but it would be great if Google Reader added the option to separate the page in sections.

Share Web Sites with Google Shared Stuff

Raj's shared items in Google Reader

Google has quietly introduced a new app of sorts called Shared Stuff, a social bookmarking service offering a strange balance of Google Bookmarks, del.icio.us, and Google Reader shared feeds with a heavy dose of Gmail integration. You can add items to your Shared Stuff with the bookmarklet at the Shared Stuff homepage. The service integrates with your Google account and Gmail contacts so that, for example, when you go to the Shared Stuff homepage you'll see shared stuff from your Gmail contacts (which sounds like a potential headache, since Gmail saves all of your contacts).

In addition to the straight bookmarking aspect, the Shared Stuff bookmarklet also lets you email the page (again, integrated with your Gmail account), and you can even use the bookmarklet to share or bookmark the page with a different service, from Digg and del.icio.us to Facebook and Furl. Check out some of the Google Shared Stuff features in the gallery below.

Lifehacker photo gallery thumbnails require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click here to see the Google Shared Stuff photo gallery in a Javascript-enabled web browser.

Strangely, Shared Stuff is not entirely up to snuff yet and surprisingly buggy. I noticed a significant lag between the time I shared an item and when it showed up on my Shared Stuff page. Also, the bookmarket wouldn't let me share the same page twice unless I did so at the same time, meaning that I couldn't add a site to my Shared Stuff page, close the bookmark window, and then fire off the bookmarklet a second time to email the page to a friend. This is a strangely hodgepodge and kind of careless offering from Google, but the underlying ideas—like wide integration with your Google account—show promise.

Google Misses the Mark with Reader Shared Items

This might make the folks at Facebook feel better about the whole Beacon privacy fiasco. It appears that even Google can make a mistake, as they did this month when they made shared items in Google Reader accessible to all Google Talk friends. Without asking. And without an easy way to opt out, short of deleting contacts or not sharing anything.

I don't know if I'd go so far as some, who claim that the move by Google ruined Christmas, but it was an unnecessarily foolish move by Google, which could have been avoided by making the sharing an opt-in decision, instead of an opt-out one.

This week (being a slow news week and all), many bloggers took offense to the move. Some complained that Google is invading their privacy by sharing items with people who they didn't intend to share with. Others blame users for not understanding what "shared" means.

Last night, the product team responded on the Google Reader blog with a response to the "helpful feedback" it received from bloggers. The sharing feature is still automatic and opt-out, but now users can quickly create a new tag for all shared items and then decide which contacts to share those items with.

And a link is presented at sign-in to a page that explains the process in the Reader Help Center:"If for any reason you'd like to start your sharing afresh, you can always remove all your previously shared items. Just go to the Friends Settings and click Move or Clear Shared Items. You will be given an option to select or create a tag and move your shared items to that tag, or clear your shared items. The items will remain in their original feeds along with any tags you've given them, but will no longer be in your shared items feed."