Online Trust in a Web 2.0 World

As more and more of the most popular websites depend on user-generated content, trust becomes an increasingly important commodity.  The success of a site like eBay depends on a system of community trust where buyers and sellers carry a reputation based on the feedback they have received from others in the community.  Such a system exists for other large sites as well, but the problem of how to extend such a system of trust to smaller sites is a difficult one. 

The anonymous nature of the Internet makes it hard to know exactly who IS trustworthy. Is this eBay user really selling this rare jazz record, or is it a hoax? Does this auto-care blogger actually know anything about cars?  A famous New Yorker cartoon in 1993 carried the caption "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog." -- as the internet becomes ever more user-centered we will need to find better ways to deal with this problem.

Venyo, one of the websites we have integrated with, is attempting to tackle this problem. Their concept is that users carry a reliability index--a "Vindex"-- made up of ratings given by users on any website.  The magic of the Vindex is that they are offering a Trust platform which ties to the user, rather than to a specific website or community. 

A Vindex rating box instantly tell you how a user's reliability has been judged by the larger online community, giving you peace of mind when interacting with that person's online contributions. And by clicking someone's Vindex box, you have the opportunity to rate that person yourself, warning or encouraging other users about that person's reliability.

 To sign up for a Venyo.org account, click here. Once you've signed up, log into your myDataBus account and click the Profile tab. Scroll down to the Venyo login box and submit your Venyo user name and password. Your Venyo Vindex will be posted next to your name in myDataBus group lists and on the download pages of e-mailed myDataBus files. Your myDataBus contacts can then see your reliability rating and have the opportunity to rate you themselves.

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.

New Social Bookmarking Tools

Social bookmarking and news sites are an interesting way to share your interests and find sites you might never have come across on your own. They are often a great way to find entertaining videos, pictures and websites when you are looking to kill some time; so in the spirit of helping you to share your content we have added a long list of services to myDataBus.com. Go create links from your Public Files page and you will see our expanded list of "one-click" sharing options.

Do you use one of these services? Try it out now, click on a link below to share this blog entry!

Digg.net
Del.icio.us
Stumble Upon
Furl
blinklist
Ma.gnolia
Simpy
Spurl
Reddit
Netvouz
Newsvine
Tailrank

All of these links are now available for your Albums also; click on an album and you will see a row of icons near the top of the page.

Did we miss your favorite? Send an email and let us know!

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.

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.

Facebook and myDataBus.com; two great sites that go great together!

Calling all facebook.com users; now you can access your facebook account from within myDataBus! We are participating in a new developer program launched by facebook that allows us to tie certain information from your facebook account into your myDataBus account. This is a 'beta' program, which means that for now the features are somewhat limited, but as the facebook interface matures we will be adding more and more ways to share files with your friends through myDataBus.com.

In this first release you can:
* Copy information from facebook on the signup page for new myDataBus accounts
* See profiles of group members who have facebook accounts
* See the number of posts on your wall
* See number of total messages, and unread count
* See the number of Pokes (total and unseen)
* View your facebook photo albums
* View pictures of you on facebook

Use and enjoy-- and look for more great features as this program expands!