Online services

Thousands of Evernote users affected by data loss

Online note-saving service Evernote on Monday acknowledged that it had suffered a hardware fault at the beginning of July that resulted in potential data loss for more than 6,000 of its users worldwide.

The issue was first reported by blog Techwave, citing a report from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. In a Monday note to Evernote users on the company's blog, Evernote CEO Phil Libin explained that the loss stemmed from bad server hardware:

"Every user's data is stored on a 'shard.' A shard is made up of a server together with a redundant fail-over server. If there is any problem with a server, the system automatically fails over to the second server in the shard. We currently have 37 shards. Shard 22 was the one that had problems last month."

Evernote's back-up system stores user data in up to six different places using both on- and off-site servers as well as locally on the user's copy of the software. Though in the case of the problem, which lasted four days, user data was simply being overwritten due to one of these systems not having a working failure routine. "Basically, the shard kept failing over back and forth between two servers over the time period causing some of the data created during that time to get overwritten," Libin explained.

In a call with CNET on Monday morning, Libin said that of the 6,323 users affected by the outage, approximately 70 percent were able to get their data back.

Evernote's software saves a copy of a work in progress before syncing it up with whatever was stored online, so the company was able to pull the complete copies of various files once the problem had been addressed and fixed. However, those who had been working purely on Evernote's site, and whose work was being stored on the faulty shard, had no such protection.

As an apology, Evernote has provided affected users with a free year of the company's $45-a-year premium service. Those who were already premium subscribers get an extra year.

As for whether this could happen again, Libin said it's extremely unlikely."This was a freak of hardware failures. But we've changed the fail-over process so it won't happen again."

Data loss on large-scale Web services is uncommon, but can be extremely hard to recover from. In 2009, social-bookmarking site Magnolia suffered a massive data corruption that resulted in the loss of all its user data. It has since started from scratch with a new version of the site. Prior to that, one of the most high-profile outages was a multi-hour downtime for Amazon's S3 cloud storage service, which many sites use as their built-in storage solution.

At a press conference three weeks ago, Evernote announced it has reached 3.7 million users since launching in June of 2008. In that time, its users have saved 145 million notes, which Libin said works out to 312 new ones every minute.… Read more

Fluther launches 'Federated': Q&A for any site

Questions-and-answers service Fluther is unveiling a new platform on Monday that lets companies integrate the Fluther community, and its real-time Q&A interface into their Web sites.

The platform, which is called Federated Fluther, can be skinned to match whatever site it's on, bringing the same feature set and functionality found on Fluther.com. Any questions that are asked on that site can then be answered both by its users, and those back over on Fluther. Likewise, the answers from either community end up in the same bucket--something that for sites with a smaller community can mean those … Read more

EU's Kroes: 30 percent of Europeans are 'digital virgins'

TRUCKEE, Calif.--Privacy concerns need to be further addressed if Europe is to lure the 30 percent of its population that remain "digital virgins" onto the Internet.

"There are still digital virgins as I am always saying," European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said, speaking Friday at the Techonomy conference here. One of the big hurdles, she said, is trust. And while the elderly are the least likely to be online, she said that it is not strictly an age issue.

Kroes was blunt when asked if there were any downsides to Europe's comparatively stricter policies regarding … Read more

Gummi bear keeps Facebook user at bay

Why would Facebook ask a user to name a gummi bear?

Like other big Web services, notably financial ones, Facebook has an adaptive login system that can ask for additional proof of identity when it sees users logging in from new or unfamiliar computers. But the peculiarities of how people use Facebook can make the system unworkable, locking out valid users by asking them to name a Facebook friend when identification is just about impossible.

CNET reader Eleanor Herman contacted us and said that when she was on vacation and tried to log in to Facebook from a borrowed computer, … Read more

HP aims to measure Twitter influence

TRUCKEE, Calif.--So what makes someone on Twitter influential?

My two cents is that it starts with not posting your every Foursquare check-in, obliquely mentioning meetings you can't talk about, or sharing your latest bodily function.

But a team at Hewlett-Packard Labs tried to find a more scientific answer by analyzing 22 million tweets published in a short span. It found that it's not the visible metrics that truly define the influentials.

Rather, influence is better measured by those whose tweets spread far and wide--something that is not so correlated as one might think to the number of followers that a particular person has.

"Most content goes very few hops," said HP Labs social-computing director Bernardo Huberman, in a meeting over lunch at the Techonomy conference here. It's the latest report from Huberman and team, who have also studied the best time to post on Digg and demonstrated how Twitter can be used to predict a film's box office success.

Huberman also has bad news for folks who think posting a lot is boosting their influence.

"I wouldn't call you influential, I would call you energetic," he said.

So, it seems the key is not just having followers, but having active ones that like to share your thoughts as opposed to those who just read. Having something worth saying probably helps, too, but that was not the subject of HP's study.

Why it matters, beyond perhaps helping me in my vain quest to crack 10,000 Twitter followers, is that the deluge of information means that there is fierce competition for issues seeking attention.

"We only talk about things that bubble to the top," he said.

Of course, identifying influential people also has other uses, such as telling companies which bloggers and tweeters to target or governments and nonprofits where their key audiences are.

The full research, conducted by Huberman and colleagues Daniel Romero, Wojciech Galuba, and Sitaram Asur is published on Scribd. You can read the whole thing after the break.

Microsoft's Seadragon goes social with Zoom.it

Microsoft Live Labs' Seadragon project now doubles as a social image host.

The technology, which allows large images to be loaded and scaled at high speeds while zooming and panning, powers a new media sharing and exploring service called Zoom.it.

Zoom.it can take any hosted image on the Web and place it within the company's Deep Zoom interface, allowing for large and complex images or graphics to fit in small spaces without a loss in quality or need for extra room.

The process of getting an image onto the service is as simple as pasting in a … Read more

Eric Schmidt on the demise of Google Wave

TRUCKEE, Calif.--Eric Schmidt tried to paint the failure of Google Wave as a sign that the company's innovative culture continues to take risks and aim big.

"Our policy is we try things," the Google CEO said, hours after the company announced it was halting development of the complex real-time communication tool. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

Schmidt said Wave, despite its lack of market success, … Read more

Google pulls plug on Google Wave

Google is waving good-bye to Wave.

The company said on its blog on Wednesday that it is halting development on Google Wave, a real-time collaboration tool aiming to combine various forms of online communication.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Senior Vice President Urs Holzle said in the blog post. "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site, at least through the end of the year, and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

Google debuted Wave in June … Read more

Report: In IE8, Web ads won out over privacy

Efforts to build Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 with more robust privacy settings were reportedly stifled by the needs of online advertisers to track user activity, according to a story in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

In designing the browser in early 2008, IE8's development team, led by manager Dean Hachamovitch, wanted to implement new privacy features that would limit third parties from easily tracking mouse clicks and other user activity, according to the Journal. The effort was seen as an attempt to distinguish Internet Explorer from up-and-coming rivals like Firefox, which had gradually been grabbing more of IE'… Read more

Microsoft's 'Street Slide' takes aim at StreetView

Google's StreetView technology, which is embedded into the Google Maps product on the browser, and on mobile phones like the iPhone and Android, has long wowed users with its option to view the road inside a 360-degree panorama. But Microsoft Research's latest effort, which is being unveiled at this week's Siggraph computer graphics conference, approaches viewing streets from a different direction. Literally.

Instead of having users venture from one "bubble" of captured imagery to the next, as is done in Google's StreetView and Microsoft's Streetside, the new technology, called "Street Slide," … Read more