Drop.io Shutdown, Cloud Storage Risks, Curry's Cloud Redirector
The acquisition of Drop.io by Facebook led to the service's abrupt closure with only 45 days' notice, resulting in the destruction of thousands of links used in podcast show notes. This event highlights the instability of "freemium" cloud business models and the risks of relying on third-party hosting for professional assets. In response, a custom URL redirector service, curryscloud.com, was developed to ensure that public links remain under personal control even if the underlying file storage provider changes.
drop.io· facebook· cloud storage· curryscloud.com· url redirector· data ownership
00:00 They should have burned it off his chest. Adam Curry, John C. DeVore. It's Thursday, November 4th, 2010. Time for your Gitmo Nation Media Assassination Episode 249-er. This is no agenda. Moving off the cloud and coming to you from the Hilltop Watchtower, Crackpot Command Center, Gitmo Nation West, here in the People's Republic of Southern California. In the morning, I'm Adam Curry. I don't know when he was ever in the cloud. Well, maybe his head's in the clouds. Mine's not, I'm John C. Dvorak. I, as you know, I said... Why don't you explain to people, new listeners, what the Drop.io fiasco was? Okay. So, we were... So, first of all, there's the concept of the cloud, which is all of this stuff that we... where we put our stuff, our valuable stuff on these services, many of them free, with a freemium model. So, you get like some space free and then you get some services with it and everyone kind of leeches on it and then, you know, some people actually start to use this stuff professionally.
01:23 like Drop.io which was a place where you could create basically little file storage very quickly, drag and drop stuff into your browser and you'd have links to these things so it's kind of hosting with some links that you can then post. Right. And so I, of course, one of the people who supported this service and actually paid for more storage and we're the guys that always get screwed in the end because of course these business models actually are quite unsustainable. You think about bandwidth and you know store it's just not completely cheap to keep all that running and the amount of people I think who take advantage of the freemium services is too small so it just doesn't really work.
02:02 Unless you go to advertising at huge scale like Facebook and Google. So anyway, Facebook bought Drop.io which apparently was to get the human resources from everything I read. They wanted the human resources to come and work for them. And so they say, oh that's great, we'll take the money, whatever it is, undisclosed. But then they close down the service with like a 45 day notice. So all of those links which are created and copied and linked everywhere to our show notes, our art, other assets that we've published, are just being destroyed. And I have no way to track it. I mean, I created thousands of drops. It's an impossible job to go and figure out
02:46 Even for a couple hundred episodes of show where everything is so I decided I would never let that happen again, of course right because Because it would happen again. And it will, and it'll happen to Facebook. One way or the other people are going to get screwed with Facebook too. You watch it, it always happens. It's all a bunch of bullcrap. I mean I witnessed this in the 90s. Oh no don't worry we'll be around forever, we got an escrow and you can get your data. Your data's an escrow man, don't worry about it. It's like what? Escrow. Escrow. I can just see it. You dropped the escrow bomb. Believe me, I've heard that in many a pitch on internet, interweb-based stuff. So then it kind of hit me. I was like, oh, it's very obvious. The cloud as in a storage place is actually kind of good because it lets someone else deal with all the hassle of bandwidth transfer and all that. But the things you need to own are your domain name, right? That's the number one thing.
03:50 And which of course is also by definition a cloud-based service, but the only people who can essentially mess that up is like government so you know so I Get it. I guess that's all we can say about that But the big thing for me is links links is definitely like the currency of the internet and so I I built a little cloud URL redirector so every link I post in public and at least to something that is an asset that I control, will now run through curryscloud.com. So if I have this stuff... You went out and got a domain name called curryscloud.com? Mm-hmm. And then I built a little service, and it's just like Bitly, and I'm going to be using it instead of Bitly. It has all the same cool statistics and everything I can see, which is a benefit. I can see how many people clicked on the link, you know, just basic statistics on that.
04:49 But it should where these files are hosted and of course I've set up a backup strategy so I you know I can easily replicate Let's say I'm hosting stuff now at Apple and if Apple decides which they could do at any moment They could say oh this I disk that's really not working for us We'll give you three months to close it down, and they've done that they did that with their old web-based service So just you got to migrate it off. It's we're gonna close it and Yeah, so all those links get hosed so instead of those links getting hosed now I can just take a folder drop it somewhere else go into my database just change all the The base URLs and voila not a single link is broken. It's a service I tell you it's a service to our human resources and I'd like to say in the morning to them in the chat room at no agenda chat net and of course to all ships at sea
