Updates Today - Groups, PayPal, Facebook

If you use our group features very often you may have already noticed that we pushed out an overhaul of the groups system earlier today. Most of the changes are architectural, designed to help us scale better and give us more flexibility in adding features, but there are some pretty radical UI changes as well. Let us know what you think!

Quick summary of the group changes:

• Zoho editing is now available for any file you have added to a group
• All of the group features have been combined into a single page; look on the right side of your files to view group members, information, invite people to join, or edit the group settings.
• The group member list now displays the actual name of each member, rather than their email address!
• On the member listing you can roll over a name to see profile information about that user.

In the payments department we have added an option to sign up for a paid account using your PayPal account in addition to our Credit Card option; this should be especially helpful for our international users. PayPal has over 100 million account members in 103 countries and regions around the world, and can accept transactions in 16 currencies

In this release we have updated to the newest version of the Facebook API; and improved our picture features. If you have Facebook, try this: use the link in the toolbar to log into your Facebook account, then click on either "Photos of You" or "Facebook Albums" to view your pictures. To download full size images into your myDataBus.com account, click the "Load Image" button... your Facebook photos are now in My Files! You can even import an entire album at once from the Facebook Albums page; complete with your comments!

Scheduled Maintenance Friday 3/23

We will be moving some servers around this Friday (March 23) evening, so myDataBus.com will be temporarily offline beginning around 5pm EST. Watch this address (http://mydatabus.blogspot.com) for updates, and thanks again for using myDataBus!

Added Support for editing spreadsheets; viewing PowerPoint files

For those of you enjoying our new support for document editing through the excellent Zoho Writer, we have added support for Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show today!

Zoho Sheet is an online alternative to commercial desktop spreadsheet applications, with great charting features and more! Click Edit with Zoho next to any Excel (.xls) file to view and edit in Sheet, then click save to update the file in your myDataBus account.

Zoho Show is a matching tool to create, edit, publish, and show presentations. At this time the Zoho API only supports viewing presentations (we will add support in myDataBus for editing as soon as it is released!), but if you have PowerPoint presentations loaded into your account this is a really great way to preview or even present them to others. Click on "Show with Zoho" to open your presentation in a very useful flash player. Ready to present? There is a full screen icon on the player that gives you a very handy presentation mode!

We have added Zoho links to search results now as well; try searching for "doc" for a demonstration.

Edit your documents online with Zoho!

Our mantra lately has been coming up with creative new ways for you to do stuff with your files; mainly by focusing on sharing them with others. To that end we have created the new Blogger and TypePad widgets, the Digg and Del.ico.us links on public files, The Plaxo address book tool and the latest round of Facebook API updates.

Our latest addition turns to managing your own files; we are really excited to announce that we have incorporated ties to Zoho Writer (and will soon be adding Zoho Sheets!). Zoho provides a suite of 11 products designed to give users a full range of office software online. Click options next to any supported file, and you have a new option: Edit with Zoho. (Also available from search results) When you have finished editing your document click the Save button in the top left corner of the Zoho window and your updated file will be saved back to your account at myDataBus.

Zoho Writer is a great lightweight editor with a clean and responsive interface, but there are some useful power features hidden away. Click on the Save As... menu for instance and you can export your document in other formats (including Adobe Acrobat). One feature I haven't seen promoted nearly enough is the really slick way that Zoho Writer deals with HTML files. Try it- open an HTML file from your myDataBus account; you get a full WYSISYG web interface that can manage tables, image properties, CSS information and more!

The new Edit with Zoho feature will work with Microsoft Word (DOC), OpenOffice text (ODT & SXW), HTML, and RTF documents; we plan to release Zoho Sheets support soon which will add Microsoft Excel (XLS) files to the mix.

Public File Limits Update

Older users who still have increased public file bandwidth limits will be dropped to 5GB/day today. If you have signed up in the last month or so and have a 1GB/day limit (or if you don't use public files!) you can ignore this message-- for the rest of you please make a note that we will be finishing the transition next weekend, the rest of the way down to 1GB.

If you have been using the extra bandwidth you may start to receive emails from our system warning you that you are about to exceed your limit; or you can check your current usage by clicking on the "Settings" tab.

Need more? Upgrade!
We have made it easy to design your own service plan at myDataBus.com; log into your account and click the upgrade link to find out just how inexpensive it can be to add storage or transfer to meet your needs.

For more information about limits and why they are being reduced see the blog entry announcing the change:
http://mydatabus.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-limits-on-public-files.html

Once again we thank you all for using myDataBus.com to store and share your files; and we are looking forward to some great new features to come!

Blogger, Digg, and TypePad, Oh My!

Telling the world about your public files is even easier now, with one-click tools to add your public file links to popular social websites! Take a look: go to your public files, and click on a filename to create links to that file. Your new options are listed on the right side of the screen.

Digg This File!
Share this file on facebook
Save This File to Del.icio.us
Add to Blogger
Add to TypePad

We will be adding an option to create a Blogger and TypePad widget with multiple file links soon, you will be able to access it by selecting several files from the My Public Files page.

Increased file size for uploads on paid accounts!

One request we hear a lot from users is for the ability to upload files larger than 500MB. We worked hard on the business model for file size and came up with what we think is a good approach to meet your needs: as of today all paid users have the ability to upload files up to 1.5GB in size.

This includes any paid account; whether you have the $9.95/year plan (a GREAT deal-- bump up to 10GB of storage, NO ADS, and twice the storage for less than $1/month!) or any of our a-la-carte bandwidth and storage upgrades.

The other half of this announcement is that we will be lowering the limit for free users to 250MB per file beginning next week.

We also wanted to let you know that for those users who have been enjoying the old 20GB/day public file limit we have started lowering your numbers as promised. We wanted to do this gradually to help ease the transition, so this weekend you will drop to 10GB/day; and you can expect to be down to 1GB sometime in the next couple of weeks. If you start running over your limit we encourage you to check out the upgrade page to see how easy it is to choose the features you want in a file hosing service!