Cubegeek

Triplicate

It has turned out to be remarkably simple to add Google Drive to Vault 330. I already had a sense of what to put into Google Docs and what to put into Dropbox. And then when I took a moment to think about it, what Evernote has come to be. These are the three technologies in competition, along with my blogs, to the question of what I need to store out there vs on my local drives in the Vault. The first three are redundant but easily accessible to me when I am elsewhere. The blogs are always easily accessible elsewhere but have no redundancy that I control. I should remedy that with some scrapers in the future, but for now the question is more about the separation of duties between GDrive and Dropbox.

I think of them essentially as the same service but obviously with a bit more integration on the Dropbox side. With that in mind, I will be moving all of my personal stuff to the GDrive and leaving Dropbox more for business. By business, I mean business documents. Business data will probably remain permanently in the Vault (meaning my own array of external USB drives at home) and semi-permanently in S3 when I need it. Business code is in my private account on Codeplane via git and some at Github and yet more sftp on my own static website hosted by Dreamhost. There will be one exception to the personal vs business and that will be for those of my most personal favorite pictures that I synch with iOS. 

The personal documents are all going to GDrive as well as some fraction of my most important photos. Specifically, those photos that I also have on Dropbox will be stored there, somewhere in the iCloud which now seems manifestly transitory, and synched to my iOS devices.  The bulk of my photos are still on local disks in the Vault and that's because all of the photo services I use are fairly closed and greedy. It would be nice for my Picasa to read and exchange with my Flickr and both of those to go back and forth with Aperture but it's not all there yet. 

Meanwhile, the clear winner for me is Evernote. Anything that I care enough to make into a PDF goes into Evernote. Simple. Plus I do a manual scrape as I read Flipboard. Altogether it's a very nice ecosystem.

The Coming Rule of the Market Quants

All I have to say is this. Google getting into the consumer survey business is the beginning of the end of marketing as we now know it. This was something I rather expected to see and because of that I started fleshing out an idea a few years ago called WWID.

WWID stands for 'what would i do'. I describe it at my other blog.  The point is that marketing survey data should belong to you, not to marketing companies. If you want people to market to you individually, they should pay you for the privilege. If you volunteer data into a marketing database that you fractionally own, then this would be possible. But the problem is that you have been volunteering data (involuntarily by clicking terms of service that you never read) that transfers ownership of that data to marketers. Now Google is in the game and that means the game is almost over. 

There is an exception. I'll tell you about it next time I talk about behavioral economics.