Web Technology

Network-attached storage (NAS) has been on the verge of breaking through into the mainstream consumer space for quite a few years.

The idea is deceptively simple – plug a hard drive into your network (that is, into your router) and then you can share the storage across all your computers, and share music, photos and video all from one place.

Quite a few companies – including Buffalo, Netgear and Iomega – have offered consumer versions of more high-end network storage for some time.

The reality is somewhat different, as anyone without an engineering degree who has ever tried to “mount”, or connect to, networked hard drives or grapple with RAID system will attest.

There are so many different configurations of hard drive back-ups – from simple mirroring of one drive to another to ensure at least one disk remains healthy, to multiple mirrors in a collective configuration – that for the ordinary mortal, myself included, networked (or even non-networked) storage has sometimes proved offputting.

Coupled with the sometimes byzantine process of connecting to drives – depending on whether you use a Mac, Windows or Linux – and whether the drive itself is formatted correctly for the operating system you are using, it is easy to see why most people have simply stuck with a plug-in external drive.

We’ve seen a number of attempts recently to simplify this process.

Apple launched the Time Machine and Time Capsule combination, which automatically backs up data wirelessly from your Mac. It’s a simple idea, and unfortunately for many people, this simplicity brings with it a lack of flexibility.

Time Machine is a no-nonsense dump of all your data and any changes you make, but with few options around doing anything else, such as streaming to consoles or media players around the home.

Another attempt to simplify NAS has come via a set of standards, called the Digital Living Network Alliance.

This umbrella organisation allows different devices on the network to talk to each other and share media. So a DLNA-compliant TV can stream video from a DLNA media server, for example.

I recently bought a NAS for my home; a one terabyte Iomega Home Media Network Drive. The box said it was DLNA-compliant, compatible with the Mac, and reviews I had read said it was easy to set up and use.

Well, this was partly true.

Physical set-up was easy – simply switch on and plug the NAS into a wireless router via ethernet cable.

It comes with software which promises to autodetect the drive and then “mount” on to my machines in the form of shared folders. The idea is that you install the software on all the Macs or PCs sharing your internet connection and they will all be able to read and write to the drive.

Sadly, this was not the case. The supplied software would not see the drive at all. As far as it was concerned, I did not have a drive attached to the network.

A quick search of the Iomega forums and it was clear this was a problem suffered by anyone using the latest version of the Apple operating system, Leopard.

No problem, though: the Apple OS can mount network drives if you know the internet protocol (IP) address of the drive, or you know its name on the network.

A bit of digging through the settings of the drive and, hey presto, I now had access to the folders on the drive on my machines. The only issue is that I have to manually connect to the drive each time I switch on the Macs.

There is another work-around, but even if that works, every time you put your machine to sleep for a long period and then wake it up, the drive and its folders will no longer be available.

This is a common problem. There is a work-around for this also here, but it is clearly beyond what most users will be prepared to do and makes a bit of a mockery of the supposed consumer-friendliness of the device.

And this isn’t a problem confined to Iomega – this is an issue with all network drives and putting machines to sleep.

Thankfully, when the NAS is working, it works like a treat. Not only can my family now share documents more easily across the network, we can also use our PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 to stream any video, music or photos from the network drive.

Sadly, this doesn’t include Apple’s iPhoto. iPhoto was never designed to be a multi-user program and while it is possible to move an iPhoto library to the network drive, it remains fiddly and prone to problems.

The same is somewhat true of iTunes. It can be moved to the network drive, but I wouldn’t advise it, unless you were completely comfortable messing around with folder structures.

Luckily, the Iomega drive is one of a number that come with an iTunes server built in to the hardware, so you can use that to play and store all your music. However, there are limitations: you can’t build playlists on the server, so if you want to do more with your music collection, you are out of luck.

I should also stress that these issues related to iPhoto and iTunes are software problems and not related to the drive itself. Neither application was designed with the networked household in mind.

They do have simple sharing/viewing options built in – so you can view the photos of another iPhoto user or listen to the tracks of another iTunes user on the same network – but this is not the same thing as building a truly networked iTunes library or iPhoto collection.

So where does this leave network-attached storage and the consumer?

To my mind, there’s a number of hurdles to overcome before NAS is truly ready for the mainstream home – starting with the hardware itself, the software used to connect to the drives, the operating systems, and the programs we use to store and share our music, videos and photos.

Well, we all know that what we need is at least one really really good friend. But in the world of social networking, the average is 120. That’s according stats from Facebook – which, by the way, has just topped 200m. Now that is a lot of friends to poke and throw sheep at, whatever way you slice and dice it.

It’s clearly a watershed moment for the company which is just over five years old. I have no idea if the two-hundred-millionth active user was given a bottle of champagne or free lunch with founder Mark Zuckerberg, but I feel they should get something, even if it is a free t-shirt!

One thing Mr Zuckerberg did to mark this momentous happening was write a blog post. He also announced a new space on Facebook where people can write and share their stories about how Facebook has helped them to give back to their communities, to effect change or to connect with a distant relative. In other words, Facebook community, this is your opportunity to write about how wonderful Facebook is.

They have put a cool timeline on the blog page that shows how fast the community has grown – but really, it underlines how much of the world still has to be conquered by the service. World domination is still some way away, it seems.

But before anyone goes totally negative on the whole online friends routine, a study by IBM and MIT [460Kb PDF] has discovered that there is money to be made from those buddies.

The IBM collaboration with MIT’s Sloan School of Management tracked the electronic communications of over 7,000 volunteers for three years. The aim of the work was to put a dollar amount on the effect of those electronic and virtual relationships.

Researchers found that having strong connections to managers (yes, sucking up to the boss) can boost the bottom line. On average, it adds up to $548 (£365) in extra revenue a month.

This conclusion is based on data and mathematical formulas that analysed e-mail traffic, address books and buddy lists of 2,600 IBM consultants over the course of a year.

No word on how those involved in the failed Sun takeover talks rated!

It’s a month since the row between YouTube and songwriters saw all professional music videos withdrawn from the video-sharing service in the UK. And there’s no sign of peace breaking out – indeed the row appears to be getting more heated.

French and German musicians are also in dispute with YouTube – with music videos now blocked from the German site, and the threat of similar action in France. And later today the Performing Rights Society holds a meeting in London where musicians will press their case for what they’re calling “fair play for content creators“.

What this all signals is a growing revolt by creators against the idea that “free” is the only model that works on the internet – or that getting into bed with Google is the only way to secure their online future. The musicians say they’re getting peanuts – and a number have been giving chapter and verse on what exactly they earn from YouTube.

Pete Waterman says he’s never made more than £11 for 100 million plays of Rick Astley’s Never gonna Give You Up. Brendan Graham, who wrote You Raise Me Up, a song which appears in many forms on YouTube, and has been viewed milions of times says he got a “a very impressive royalty statement from PRS… of about 30 pages of YouTube royalties… coming to about 30 pence.”

So do these figures stand up? Well neither Google – YouTube’s owners – nor the PRS will give chapter and verse on their previous licensing agreement, but neither are they disputing the size of the payouts. But the problem, in the words of someone close to the negotiations, is that the PRS seems to have signed “a rubbish deal ” – at least as far as the songwriters are concerned. And that’s because it was struck when YouTube was in its infancy – oooh two or three years back – and nobody saw it growing into a major force in the music business.

Now the PRS has demanded a rate per stream from YouTube which Google says is just completely unrealistic – and would mean the search firm would lose money every time someone watched a music video.

Mind you, the German songwriters union has apparently looked at what the British are asking for – and demanded a rate 50 times higher.

So there’s still a large gap between what the songwriters want and what Google is willing to pay. But there’s a wider issue here.The YouTube business model – acting as a free platform for content and then advertising around it – just isn’t working either for Google or for the content creators.

In a recent study, analysts at Credit Suisse calculated that running YouTube would cost $711m this year – that includes the huge sums needed to store videos as well as the cash paid out in licensing fees. But Credit Suisse says the revenue the site would earn from advertising would amount to no more than $240m, even assuming a 20% rise this year.

You don’t have to be very good at maths to see that the sums just don’t add up – and will look even less attractive if Google has to pay out more to the content creators. But the PRS says that’s not its problem – “Why should our members subsidise YouTube’s failed business model?” a spokesman asked me.

And they’re not the only creators asking whether handing over their content to Google is quite such a good idea. Newspapers are also beginning to grumble again about the return – or lack of it – they get from Google News.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, hit back yesterday accusing the newspaper industry of “dropping the ball” when it came to online distribution.

On one side you’ve got content creators, from songwriters to journalists, seeing “analogue dollars turning into online cents”, as they describe it. On the other, you’ve got the only business that’s really mastered the art of making large sums from online content – without producing any itself. Prepare for a long battle.

The very addictive Tap Tap Revenge, that involves users tapping through beats or shaking their device along with the music, has made history by becoming the most downloaded of all the 15,000+ apps in the App Store.

In its first AppStore penetration survey, comScore Inc reports that one out of every three apps downloaded by the 15 million strong user base is the one developed by Palo Alto company Tapulous. comScore says this is a big deal for a smaller developer.

“It’s impressive that a game like Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge can attract a higher penetration among Apple app users than apps for larger more established brands,” said comScore’s vice president Brian Jurutka.

“Tap Tap’s success demonstrates that there is ample opportunity in the app space for any publisher to obtain significant distribution with a product that engages users.”

For Tapulous this all equals dollars in the bank.

Bart Decrem who is the CEO says: “With such a large base having already installed the free version of the product, converting even a small portion into paid versions using premium content represents significant revenue upside.”

The company’s next premium product will involve the seven time Grammy award-winning band Coldplay.

Facebook came in as the fourth most popular app with MySpace at number seven.

The comScore survey also illustrates the importance of games to devices like the iPod Touch and iPhone. Twelve out of 25 of the most popular mobile apps were games including the old favs like Hangman and Pac-man.

When an e-mail arrived from a reader earlier this afternoon about a story we’d written on new EU regulations on data retention, I have to confess I was rather slow to react. Then I had another look and noticed this in the second paragraph:

…the Home Office is linking to a Chinese porn website.

Mike Riley had been wondering whether the new directive applied to his company. He needed to know if he was a “communications services provider”, and so under an obligation to retain his customers’ data.

Off he went to the Home Office website, and eventually burrowed his way down to this page. On the right, he noticed several links, including one to a body called the Technical Advisory Board (the link has since been removed). This, according to information elsewhere on the Home Office site, is a “non-departmental public body that advises the Home Secretary on whether the obligations imposed on communications service providers (CSPs) under the terms of RIPA are reasonable”. But when Mr Riley clicked on the link he was directed to what appeared to be a porn site.

After reading his email, I too clicked on the link – and ended up on the same site, though it appeared to be Japanese rather than Chinese. I contacted the Home Office press office, and provided them with the first news of this embarrassing glitch.

Within minutes, they had broken the link, then removed it altogether from the page. The press officer thanked me – and stressed that the site had not, as we’d both at first assumed, been hacked. Instead, she said someone had taken over what was a redundant site, which had once belonged to the Technical Advisory Board, and occupied it with something rather different.

So is this a serious matter – or just a moment of embarrassment for a government department which has had its fair share in recent days? Mr Riley says it does matter. He says he’s still not sure whether he’s covered by the new directive and has “little faith in getting an answer from the Home Office who seemingly are unable to monitor and securitize, their own site let alone the communications data of millions of email users in the country”.

On the other hand, this kind of stunt happens to a number of prominent websites – and causes red faces rather than real damage. A bigger threat appears to come from the Chinese group which has allegedly managed to hack its way into government departments around the world in a cyber-warfare operation. But I can imagine the Home Office will be hoping not to hear the word “porn” again for at least a few weeks.

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On Wednesday, Paul Jacobs spotted a Google Street View car in his village.

It was executing a nifty turn in the dead-end street just outside his home, and that made him cross, because it appeared that the camera mounted on a pole was peering over his high fence to get a view. He and a neighbour John Holmes rushed out of their homes to confront the driver.

A short while later – after an amicable chat with the man from Street View – the car left this quiet village outside Milton Keynes. It appeared that Broughton could rest easy, with no prospect of cameras shoving their lenses where they’re not wanted and invading the privacy of this quiet backwater.

Two days later, I’m here with a large BBC satellite truck and a cameraman – and at least two other camera crews have been spotted in the village this morning. The village was also featured in the local papers yesterday and much of the national press this morning. So how private is this place now?

But make no mistake, the battle of Broughton is another embarrassment for Google – and gives us another interesting angle in the debate over privacy. Just hours after Street View was launched last month, complaints were already coming in about unblurred faces and embarrassing incidents caught on camera.

Google acted quickly to deal with those issues and it appeared that the controversy was over. Millions of us have been using the service – not so much, I suspect, to visit landmarks but to check out that house we used to live in years ago and tut-tut over the nasty shade of paint the new owners have chosen for the front door.

But now – for the first time, as far as I can see – a whole village has revolted. Paul Jacobs insists he’s no Luddite or Nimby – and uses Google himself for navigation. He just feels they’ve overstepped the mark, coming a little too close with their cameras. “I’ve no objection to them taking wide shots of vistas – it’s when they’re taking close-ups of people’s homes, that crosses the line.” His neighbour John Holmes puts it more firmly – “an Englishman’s home is his castle” – and wants Street View out of the village altogether.

You may point out to them that estate agents pictures of people’s homes are widely available on the internet – they’ll respond that those shots are taken with the owners’ agreement.

Google says it isn’t breaking any law by taking these pictures – they’re always shot from the public highway. And by agreeing to black out homes if people aren’t happy to have them shown, they’re going further than they need to. After all, if you or I want to take a picture in the street and then post it online, there’s nothing to stop us.

But what Google is finding again is that its sheer scale and reach makes people nervous. So the people of Broughton seem relatively relaxed about having our cameras pointed down their street. But the idea of any one of Google’s hundreds of millions of users making their way down the village streets and peering over the hedge? That, they believe, is a step too far.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, internet guru Tim O’Reilly threw out the possibility that perhaps the name should be changed.

He said he and his friend John Battelle of Federated Media had been playing around with an alternative which was Web 2.0 + World = Web Squared.

When I asked Mr O’Reilly if he loved or hated the name Web 2.0 that he popularised, he let out a big sigh and said “Awww does it have to be one or the other?”

Eventually he admitted “I love it and I hate it. It’s a term that has been very effective and very successful in getting across an idea. I spent a long time talking about that idea around the turn of the Millenium, talking about building the internet operating system. It didn’t catch on and all of a sudden we had this new term Web 2.0 and everyone got it so how could you not love that?”

In the end he said “I have mixed feelings about it. I am delighted with its effectiveness, it did what I wanted it to do. To catalyse the industry after the dotcom bust that things weren’t over and that something mattered about the companies that had survived. They knew something that the others didn’t. And I think that continues to be true.

“The companies that are succeeding today understand better than others what it means to be building software in the age of the internet.”

As to really getting behind Web Squared, Mr O’Reilly said “It was just one of these idle thoughts where you go dub dub dub and then you go one more w and that gets you to web squared, right?”

My unscientific research on the expo floor found more people hating than loving the Web 2.0 title.

Paul Thompson said “Keep it. It hasn’t been around for very long and you need a few years to build an identity. If you replace it with Web Squared, people will go what happened to Web 2.0?”

Mark Kirthcart thought “it’s sounding a little dated and overused.”

Sindee Thomson’s view was “Web 3.0 will be here soon.” For her, Web Squared was a total no no. “I hate it. It reminds me of mathematics and I was never good at my sums. I think it should be Web Cubed.”

Brooklynn Morris was a big fan. “I think Web 2.0 is a great title but I think people don’t like titles in general especially when it gets in the way of free concepts.”

Kevin Marshall said he thought people were “tired of Web 2.0 because of all the hype around it. Web Squared however, I don’t think is any better.”

Alistair Mitchell suggested that instead of Web Squared it should be “Web Shared because the web today is all about sharing – sharing the content of your life through things like Flickr, Facebook, where you live, where you are and how you work.”

Taomas Rio said “Web 2.0 is too techy. Sure the core of people who come here know what it means but the internet is always evolving so why do you need versions or numbers to categorise it?”

As for Web Squared, Taomas was aghast. “Oh no that’s web weird!”

Any better suggestions?

It’s clear that there has been a huge amount of social media activity around the G20 summit, and the demonstrations in the City and at the Excel centre. But some are suggesting that these new tools – in particular Twitter – have been vital to the organisation of the demos. I’m not so sure.

It does seem as though just about everyone involved in G20 – from the politicians to the journalists, from bloggers to demonstrators – has been snapping, filming recording everything in site and uploading it to the web to share with the world.

I spent Wednesday trying to monitor events via Twitter, Facebook, AudioBoo, and various websites. One good place to go was this site, created by a group of journalism students who set out with mobile phones to record the day’s events. Alex Wood, who masterminded the project, even ended up providing this video from his mobile phone to the BBC.

My own Twitter searches came up with some useful insights – though it was as ever hard to pick out the genuine eyewitnesses from all those simply reprocessing what they’d just seen on the television. I particularly liked this message from one frustrated Twitterer trying to get the word out from the Bank of England:

“Mobile coverage v bad prob due to number of anarchists also using iPhones”.

Just a minute – anarchists using iPhones? Or Twitter? Does that really compute? One is a mobile phone that you might think was more of a yuppie toy than a revolutionary tool – the other is a social network used principally by an older, more establishment crowd than, say, Facebook. Or maybe those are just my preconceptions?

I asked Alex Wood what his impression had been yesterday. He said there were a surprising number of people around him using both Twitter and iPhones, but he wasn’t convinced that they were the main ways that the demonstrators had been organised.

The G20 meltdown website had been the place to go to find out what was happening next, and he said there was also a more old-fashioned method: “They still used the good old megaphone – people were announcing on megaphones that they were putting on an alternative summit in East London.”

And he says there was just a small core of people bent on trouble: “The core of the anarchists, who were smashing up RBS, did what they did and got out quickly.”

Did they organise that via Twitter? I’d be surprised – it’s a very public place to talk about something you don’t want the police to hear.

There certainly have been plenty of fresh insights into the G20 events from sources other than the mainstream media. There are AudioBoos – sound clips uploaded to the internet from outside the Bank of England. There are hundreds of photos on Flickr, like this gallery. And there are bloggers from around the world inside the summit trying to get their voices heard.

But as far as rallying anarchists is concerned, maybe a megaphone is still proving more useful than an iPhone.

If you’ve visited the cinema or watched a DVD over the last few years, you’ve probably also been on the receiving end of a pretty stark warning. “You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag ” says the trailer before the film, hammering home the message that piracy is a crime.

But now those trailers – and another anti-piracy series involving “Knock-off Nigel” will be seen no more.

They’ve been replaced by a series of short ads promoting British cinema and thanking the public for supporting movies by buying a ticket or a DVD. And, as far as I can see, there’s not even a mention of piracy.

So did the get-tough tactics fail to do their job – and has the industry now changed tack?

“Your campaigning needs to evolve over time and have an appropriate message for today,”Eddie Cunningham, president of Universal Pictures International told me. He was explaining the new strategy to me on behalf of the Industry Trust, the body producing these trailers and fighting to promote the copyright cause for the UK film and TV business.

Mr Cunningham insisted that I was wrong to suggest the previous robust campaign against piracy had failed. ‘”If you went back to 2004, the majority of people didn’t realise it was a crime, by the end of that campaign the majority of people realised it was. Research shows us that most people now find it unfashionable – there’s been a gradual change in attitudes.”

There’s no evidence yet though that the tide has turned when it comes to the sheer scale of piracy – though the film industry has commissioned some research which it says could provide at least a hint that progess is being made.

But it seems the real news is that the nature of the anti-piracy battle has changed in two ways. Just like the music industry, the movie business has decided it’s not worth alienating its own consumers and the focus has moved from physical piracy to the online variety.

In 2004 most people didn’t have a fast enough broadband connection to make it worth the bother of downloading a movie via file-sharing software – now it’s becoming a relatively simple “hobby”.

And what really struck me about my conversation with Eddie Cunningham was his strong words about the internet service providers and his conviction that the government would force them to co-operate in the battle against piracy. “if you or I owned a house in which prostitution was taking place,” he said, “or where drug dealing was happening, we’d be responsibile.”

In other words, the ISPs are looking on as the crime of film piracy takes place down their broadband lines, and doing nothing about it.

In France the government is trying to bring in a “three-strikes” law, which would mean persistent film and music downloaders could have their broadband connections cut off.

Mr Cunningham thinks the same thing could be imminent here, if the ISPs don’t agree to self-regulation: “It’s absolutely critical for the creative industries which are terribly important for the UK, that the government steps in and does something. It’s theft and it’s only happening because we’re making it a bit too easy at the moment.”

So behind the softly-softly approach to piracy, there’s still a threat. It’s just aimed at what the film industry seems to regard as the “Knock-off Nigels” among the internet service providers, rather than at film fans.

UPDATE, 09:40: In a surprise sequel, the Industry Trust has got back to me this morning to say that Knock-off Nigel hasn’t been consigned to history after all.

While the “piracy is theft” will be withdrawn, Nigel will llive on, alongside the new “thank you” adverts. So the strategy is even more complex than I thought. Filmgoers will be complimented and mocked at the same time.

The theme of this year’s Web 2.0 Expo doesn’t shy away from the fact that the economy looms large over the event.

“The Power of Less can mean how to get more done with fewer resources,” said conference co-chair Jennifer Pahlka. It seems to be the mantra of our times, but Jennifer and the Expo are putting a positive spin on things.

“It can mean the attractive power of simplicity, and it can mean all the ways in which constraints drive creativity and opportunity.”

So this year more than ever it’s simply about doing more with less, something we have all become familiar with I am sure as companies downsize and reorganise and friends and family get laid off.

And this year’s event will be scaled down. There are fewer attendees, fewer exhibitors, less money, fewer parties, less pizzazz, less hype and no conference T-shirt.

The first day was very quiet, and always is, but seemed even more so this year. Last year there was quite a bit of buzz ahead of Microsoft’s Live Mesh announcement and Yahoo’s news that it was rewiring Yahoo to become more social.

This year just doesn’t seem to have the same fizz or anticipation. No big product announcements are expected and the only thing to get excited about is Palm who may well make some headlines when the company’s Michael Abbott makes his keynote later today.

It should be noted that Palm, which unveiled its hotly anticipated Pre smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier in the year, is not at the CTIA Wireless conference going on in Sin City at the moment.

Even though CTIA is all about mobile, the issue is a big topic at Web 2.0 and I will be following it up.

I also plan to have a look at the emergence of the real time web given the influence and impact of Twitter search. I know some of you are tired of the Twitter coverage but they will be getting some attention here with sessions on how to use the micro-blogging service in business and on analysing your followers for profit.

The Brits are back this year as well for a second time and all this week 20 start-ups will tour the Valley and press the flesh of venture capitalists and CEOs alike in a bid to make contacts and deals. Their organiser and leader Oli Barrett is taking them around all the Valley high spots such as Google, Microsoft, Plug and Play and Oracle.

Two companies have come back for a second visit so I will be catching up with them later in the week to see how they think things have changed in Silicon Valley over the last year and what their hopes and expectations are for this year’s WebMission UK.