The myDataBus Facebook Application!

The team here at myDataBus.com is thrilled to give you the all-new myDataBus Shared Files Facebook application. Robert the Summer Intern developed this application on the Facebook Platform to give you some great new ways to share.  Now your friends can listen to your music, watch your videos, and download your files--right from your Facebook profile!  You can also easily send links to your files via Facebook messages. We're pretty excited about it.

All of your public files are automatically posted to your Facebook profile when you add the application, and visitors can page through to see everything you have posted.  Click on the My Friends' Files tab lets you easily view and download files from those savvy Facebook friends who also use the Shared Files application... or hit a button to upload directly to your public files from Facebook!

Click here to get started... and then come back to the application page to let us know what you think.  What features does it still need?  What do you love about it?

Out with the old . . .

OK folks, we're all friends here. Let's be perfectly honest with each other. The ol' myDataBus file uploader wasn't exactly the greatest uploader ever.

But times have changed. The guys here at myDataBus have been hard at work on a brand-spanking-new uploader . . . go ahead, click the Upload Files button. What you have before you in all its glory is not only a faster, more reliable uploader, but an uploader that lets you SELECT MULTIPLE FILES AT ONCE. That's right, click Browse and try it out for yourself. You can select an entire folder's worth of files for upload in a matter of seconds.

Not only that, but now there are two nifty little download progress bars—the top one is for individual file download progress, and the bottom one is for the overall download progress. You can also choose to make your files public—or overwrite files with the same name—directly from the uploader! And as before, you have the option of performing a web upload by clicking the Webload button at the top of the uploader and entering a URL address.

We expect this new upload tool to evolve quickly; if you have any suggestions for it please let us know! As always, we here at myDataBus are working hard to bring you the very best in file storing and sharing. And we will continue to enhance the features of myDataBus to make it easier for you to do more with your files.

myDataBus.com Mobile is Live!

myDataBus.com Mobile is officially live; grab your cell phone and check it out! Load up http://m.mydatabus.com on your cell phone's browser, and get access to your files truly anywhere!

Some of the things you can do with myDataBus Mobile:

• Browse all of your files and folders, or use the Search feature to find something in either your files or any groups you belong to.
  
• Show file size and type, and a thumbnail of supported images.
• Download (how useful this is depends a lot on your phone!), Delete, or Email files right from your phone!
• Invite someone to one of your Groups, or to get their own myDataBus account.
  
• View your photo albums right on your phone.

Edit your photos with SnipShot and myDataBus!

Wrapping up a busy week of updates, today we released photo editing using the really great tools from SnipShot.com. This is one you have to see to really get the hang of, SnipShot is a really great tool! Go find a .jpg file in your myDataBus account and click the options button; you will see a new "Edit with SnipShot" link.

Features in brief: (From SnipShot.com)

• One-click enhance improves most images
• Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize
• Basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
• Unlimited undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or ⌘Z and ⌘Y on your Mac)
• Nondestructive editing—we always work from the original

And did I mention easy to use? Just like our Zoho tools, one click sends your file to the editor, and saving will push the updated file back to your myDataBus account.

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!

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.

Making little things count!

With much of the heavy lifting of our Amazon S3 transition behind us we've been able to spend some time making the site more fun to use. Today we released a great package of 'little' enhancements that we hope will make myDataBus much more fun to use!

• Access your address books when mailing a File and Telling a Friend about myDataBus.com We've added a widget to access email addresses stored in Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Plaxo, AOL and more!


• Improved access to features from the My Files and Group Files pages- click the new "options" button on the right side to work with your files.


• Better visibility for your file information- hold your mouse over a filename on the My Files or Group Files pages, additional file information will pop up. Try it with an image!


• Vastly improved album creation! We are painfully aware that our album implementation left a lot to be desired... and frankly it's still not where we want it to be, but today we've fixed 2 of the most annoying parts-- creating new albums and being able to preview images. Try it-- click on "My Photo Albums" then "Create New Photo Album." We know there is more to do; we'd love to hear your suggestions!


• Improved upgrade options- although our 5GB of storage and about 30GB per month of transfer for public files is pretty generous, we've created a unique a-la-carte system for upgrading exactly the features you need, as often as you like. Check it out!

New limits on Public Files

As part of the changes we have introduced this week we are announcing that free accounts at myDataBus.com will now be limited to 1GB of transfer per day for Public Files. As always there are no limits or quotas affecting transfer of your own files, or files from groups you belong to.

Those of you who have been around for a while know that we introduced public files with a very high limit so that we could evaluate how the public files would be used by our customers (20GB). We hear the groans out there from a few of our power-users, but reasonable limits are of course necessary for the long-term success of our site. We do want to thank you all and soften the blow for those that will be impacted by the new limits-- all of our existing customers will continue to enjoy a limit of 20GB per day for a limited time.

The sliver lining in these changes (you will hear much more about this later!) is that we are nearly finished converting our users to Amazon.com's S3 storage service. This means that your files are actually stored and delivered from Amazon data centers. Why should you care? Because it's fast. Very fast... if your account has been converted and you have a high speed connection you have probably already noticed that files download much faster. It also means that file downloads don't affect the myDataBus.com website, keeping it much more responsive even when a user posts a very popular file!

By way of comparison, our free accounts offer about 30GB per month of transfer for public files (sometimes called 'hosted files' by other services). Most of our competitors offer far less (or none at all!) for their free plans.

We hope you continue to enjoy using myDataBus.com, and we continue to welcome your feedback about our service!

UPGRADES TODAY

We appologize in advance for any downtime you might see today; we are in the midst of rolling out the biggest upgrade yet of myDataBus.com -- the new site will feature not only huge strides in design and ease-of-use, but new database architecture that should give you a major boost in site performance!!

Hang with us for the day, you won't be sorry!

Growing up

It seems there comes a time in the life of every growing internet company where this post is made. A rite of passage of sorts...

So yesterday we completed a round of updates and fixes that we have been working on over the last week to address issues with stability and compatibility that we think will make your user experience a LOT better on all platforms. Some of the major known issues that have been resolved over the last 2 weeks include:

* Problems with Internet Explorer logging users out after any 8 clicks on the site.
* Problems with uploads not completing, or telling the user that a session has expired at the end of an upload. (And the related problem that a number of users have had uploading files > 250MB)
* Files uploaded by Internet Explorer users sometimes only displaying in tree view, but not being downloadable.
* New signup and change password emails being filtered as spam by many ISPs.
* Form elements from other pages showing up on the 'New Folder' and 'Web Load' forms in Internet Explorer.

There have been many other minor fixes, interface changes and server upgrades that we hope will all contribute to a GREAT user experience at myDataBus.com!

Thanks for growing with us,

the myDataBus.com team

Preview of the Back-To-School release

So our next release isn't due out until the middle of next week, but we are so excited that it's hard to keep quiet! Headlining the new release is the announcement that we are going to increase all free accounts to 5 GIGABYTES.

A Teaser for other features coming next week:

• Web Load will add any file from the web directly to your account, saving you from having to first download to your computer


• Group files can now have folders


• Permissions will allow you to create different kinds of Groups


• myDataBus Mobile will give you access to your files from your phone or other portable device

And that's just the beginning!! Can't spoil the whole surprise, now can we? Let's just say that in honor of school starting we have been concentrating on features that students will appreciate.

New- Virus Scanning on all files!

Today we introduced virus scanning on all files uploaded to myDataBus.com. Breathe just a little bit easier knowing that not only are your files clean; but so are files shared by your group members and others.

Virus-Free file sharing from myDataBus.com; one more way we are working to change the way you use and share your files online!

myDataBus.com version 2.0 Posted Today

The next time you log into your myDataBus account you may notice a few changes. Well, a lot of changes. Think 'Extreme Home Makeover' kind of changes. Some of the new features you will find include:

• Improved folder management; including the ability to nest folders


• Mulit-file upload; send as many as 10 files totaling up to 500MB at a time


• New "Tree" view to look at your files in a different way


• More options for sorting the file display


• Store notes about files and folders

We changed out a lot of the plumbing and wiring in this update also, so stay tuned for a many more new feature announcements in the coming weeks!

We're Open for Business. And everyone else...

That's right; as of today anyone can sign up at myDataBus.com and take advantage of 2 Gigabytes of FREE storage for sharing, backup, collaboration and more! Developed originally with the college student in mind, myDataBus.com has only allowed registrations from users who have a .edu email address. No longer! With the release of our newest version, myDatabus is ready to share vacation photos with your family, trade revisions of documents with clients, keep important business files in a secure off-site location, and much more!

So come on in, and see what uses you can think of for your myDataBus storage!

Coming Soon... myDataBus 2.0

There is a philosophy of software development that encourages developers to "release early and often." The idea being that the more you work on a project, the more work it will need; and the more features you try to put into each release, the less likely it is that you will ever actually finish. By releasing small updates frequently we can deliver features to our users faster, but perhaps more importantly we can watch to see what features our users are requesting and using. Our product becomes better when we participate in an ongoing dialog with users, releasing a few features ever couple of weeks and constantly adjusting to user feedback.

This time... we didn't do that. myDataBus 2.0 is a huge rewrite of how we treat files, folders and users; creating a platform for us to build a really exciting slate of features in the future. The team is very excited about this release, which is being wrapped up now... including the ability to upload multiple files at a time, create and manage nested folders, email files directly from your account, and much more! The 2.0 release also features an enhanced user interface with a more intuitive controls and navigation to give you more transparent access to do what you want with your files.

The biggest news of all for 2.0 may be that we have removed the registration restrictions on the site. You no longer need to be a student to sign up for myDataBus! As we have moved out of the early development and are increasingly confident of our architecture and site design we feel that it is time to invite anyone to take advantage of a better way to work and play using myDataBus.com.

So, keep an eye on this space for the announcement-- we'll be posting the new and improved myDataBus soon!