Creating a web service that enables users to upload files up to 5gb in size is full of fail. It’s a lovely concept, but it won’t work in the long run.

I’m referring to File Dropper which just launched under the slogan "The simplest file hosting website ever". By simple it means that there isn’t any kind of user registration at all, combine that with a 5gb file limit and no ads and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster.

I understand that all this sounds nice and appealing to average users who would like to use a simple web service to share their vacation photos with somebody. But the true is that since there’s no user authentication there’s nothing deterring users from uploading copyrighted material.

Of course there’s the usual line in the Terms of Service that in clear terms prohibits any illegal activity.

Use of any FileDropper.com service to transmit any material that infringes any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other proprietary rights of any third party, including, but not limited to, the unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, the digitization and distribution of photographs from magazines, books, or other copyrighted sources, and the unauthorized transmittal of copyrighted software.

Since there’s no way of banning infringing users, FileDropper staff will have to resort to constantly monitor all the files being shared, which may seem simple at first can be an impossible task when renamed files are used to bypass any filters that may be in place.

Besides the service is very slow, which could be attributed to a surge of traffic after the launch. But being such an easy service to (ab)use the load will probably increase, specially when porn websites hear about it.

This is just a quick post about the breakout of the first twitter war. It’s a friendly and colorful war in which each twitter user can participate by following one team. Most teams are using color names, but there are already sightings of other kinds of teams.

The idea is to see which color has more followers. But there’s some discussion on how to make things more fun. Corvida at Shegeeks is trying to keep count on things but it’s not that simple since anyone can join multiple teams or create their own team.

Being Portuguese I’ve joined greenredteam. Have fun, come join the twitter color war.

I took a few minutes pause at writing this post because i hold fond memories of Second Life and because in reality it’s still there.

But the news that Philip Rosedale is leaving Second Life role as a CEO can only mean the final demise of the once booming online virtual world. According to his blog post at SL’s official blog he’ll stay with Second Life as chairman.

I’ve played with SL full time for almost an year. I experienced all the joys and sadness of a decadent online world aimed solely at profit.

Some of you who aren’t familiar with SL must understand that the game credits could be exchanged to real US dollars and this turned the aim of the whole community to make money out of SL.

I must confess that my hands aren’t entirely clean. Being a developer it was easy for me to start creating virtual stuff to sell to the dumb masses that once inhabited SL. I mostly dwelled with casino games. Back then, gambling was the major activity in SL and i supplied a couple of casinos with all kinds of games, from slots to roulettes. Most of them were truly random and luck was indeed a factor. But there were some "special" games that where a bit tilted in favor of the house. Oddly this wasn’t generating any real inflow of cash and i turned to another source of income, i became an exchange trader.

Back then the Exchange between SL’s in game credits and dollars happened outside of Linden Labs control at a website called GOM. As one would expect you could buy and sell credits for dollars. There’s always a gap between the price at which a currency is being sold and at which it’s being bought and that’s the profit traders make.

As SL’s exchange market was quite small it fluctuated according to news of stuff happening inside the game and to SL itself, like for instance the introduction of video would boost the construction of in game theaters which meant players would require a lot of credits which in turn meant that the demand for credits would rise at the exchange thus raising the value of the currency.

I noticed that besides me there were only a hand full of others trading consistently at GOM. It didn’t take long for some traders to start organizing and collaborate in an organized way to raise our profits, driving the exchange rate up and down according to our needs.

All in all it was fun and I’ve made a couple of thousand dollars that really helped back then.

But during all that time I saw no interest by Linden Labs in creating a better SL, they held a money making factory and it was working at full steam, why bother investing when thing were going so well?

I’ve discussed this many times in the past with fellow players and most of them where true believers in Linden Labs propaganda that SL was going to be the next best thing since sliced bread. But that never happened. I hate to do this but i told you so.

A week ago I’ve reported the end of ReadBurner. But as Alexander Marktl the founder of ReadBurner stated in the final post at ReadBurner’s blog, ReadBurner was for sale.

I honestly expected that some domain trader would buy it and load it with ads and popup’s but to my surprise Marktl sold to a group headed by Mashable’s Editor in Chief Adam Ostrow.

Marktl has made the official announcement just a few minutes ago and clarifies his choice in selling to this particular group:

After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build compelling web products.

Marktl also comments on the number of emails he received asking him to continue with this project, and that’s is why he’ll stay on board with ReadBurner holding an advisor status.

Adam Ostrow defines the next moves for ReadBurner on his post at Mashable announcing the acquisition.

The first step is to get ReadBurner back online, and we hope to do that within the next couple weeks. Alex – who is staying involved with the project in his free time - has some concerns about the scalability, so we’ll be addressing that before we re-launch. After that, the plan is to keep reaching out to all of the evangelists (see here, here, and here for a sampling) that ReadBurner was lucky enough to find in its first go-round and continue to improve the site based on their comments.

I’m happy with this move mainly because i liked ReadBurner clean and efficient style, RSSMeme wasn’t quite the same, maybe it’s just a design thing but what I’d really would like to see is the same kind of aggregation found in ReadBurner in FriendFeed.

I’ve been having some fun with Yahoo Live for some time now. We’ve all heard about the technical problems that have plagued the service since it’s beginning a couple of months back, but I’ve enjoyed watching anonymous people playing guitar or displaying their DJ skills for a couple of friends and casual spectators.

I’ve subscribed to Yahoo Live twitter user, and i get occasional announcements of stuff going on in Live. I was quite surprised to see that there was a town hall being held. An actual Town Hall, from a small city in Spain called Jun, with an actual mayor, talking to actual people concerned about their town needs.

I caught the event early on and was able to talk to mayor José Salas about this, and he was quite happy to explain to me that he’s been doing this sort of stuff for some years now. Jun is known for having an Internet friendly stance, being regarded by the European Community as the birth place of the active teledemocracy.

These are the things that make the endless hours of roaming through the web worthwhile. If you hurry up you can still catch the event live at http://live.yahoo.com/alcaldejun. You can also check the Mayor’s blog for the next event.

We all make choices in life, and like the rest of the world I too make them everyday. I’ve chosen ReadBurner to browse shared news and the hottest buzz around the Internet.

ReadBurner was a simple aggregator service that gauged the popularity of shared items at Google Reader and displayed the top items in a simple and easy to use interface.

It was so good that soon after it’s launch several competitors appeared with the same model. ReadBurner was created and operated by Alexander Marktl who was trying to cope alone with the pressure of being the hottest thing around the net.

But sadly the pressure was too intense and the competition was gaining strength specially RSSMeme, which is also a one man show developed by Benjamin Golub.

This one on one battle for the top shared news aggregator reached it’s end today, when Marktl wrote the following announcement on ReadBurner home page:

I’m sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer available.
The reason is that I just don’t have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out.

I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It’s been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time.

If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub.

This annoys me, not only because i liked ReadBurner, but because i now have to change my bookmarks. What I’d like to know is when will Google itself release some kind of aggregator like these services?

During our lives we cross paths with lots of different people, some of them end up being homeless. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve never quite got to understand, but i sympathize with someone who’s just like me, but happens to don’t have a house to live in.

Most of these homeless turn to begging, and scavenging stuff that they can later sell for a dollar or two. We see them roaming around the streets of our cities and just try to avoid them. Maybe once in a while someone will throw some quarters or dimes to a cup and feel that they’ve done a good thing. I do it my self and i feel that somehow I’ve helped someone that day.

On the web we see lots of donate buttons everywhere, most like homeless people they turn invisible to the eye after a while, and we just plainly avoid them. Mixing these two concepts seems pointless. But due to the nature of the web, people are always drawn to bizarre and weird stuff. And that’s what bumllionaire.com is all about.

The website is full of videos of this NY homeless guy that apparently conjured a plan to turn himself from a bum to a billionaire. The concept is quite simple, if everyone would donate just 1 dollar, he’ll be stinking rich very soon. Rich enough to be on the Forbes magazine.

The idea seems odd, but everyone loves the underdog, and also love to stick it to the man, which in this case are the bunch of rich persons that appear on Forbes.

Calling out on basic human nature to change his condition seems quite simple, and that’s why he’ll probably raise enough money to get off the streets pretty soon.

The biggest money mover on the web industry lately has been the live video niche, which it isn’t anymore. Some big players have joined the bandwagon, and have introduced live video. Justin.TV and Ustream got the ball rolling some time back, which was by that time a fringe section of the huge video market.

It’s somewhat weird that this whole market had been dormant for so long, while people watched Reality TV shows like there’s no tomorrow. There’s nothing new about the format, there’s nothing as real as watching some anonymous dude ranting about how much snowed last night. But people still preferred to watch pre-packaged, nicely produced reality TV.

Slowly, but surely things started to change and live streaming websites started popping all over like mushrooms. Then Seesmic, came along not without some controversy, and even Yahoo launched it dubious named streaming service called Live.

Youtube had been sitting this one out, ignoring the movement, ignoring all the rage about being able to diss someone live and "face to face". Until Youtube’s Steve Chen drops the hammer and announces that Youtube will add live streaming this year.

In the latter days of the Web 2.0 the new trend is to make new web sites invite only, for what’s called a private beta. Like many out there i fancy a invite only thing, it makes me feel special and unique.

So when i read about invites to a new thing called Blippr i didn’t think twice, and believe me, I’ve received invites to services that I’ll never use. It was in that mind set that I’ve arrived at blippr website, knowing absolutely nothing about it.

After the registration, i start tinkering with it, trying to understand what the site was all about, and I was in for a surprise.

A good surprise at that, Blippr takes the 160 characters rule that exist in Twitter and Jaiku to a new height, by limiting most interactions to that amount of text. At it’s heart it’s a social network devoted to comments on movies, books, music and more.

It takes a bit of Wikipedia, by allowing the user to create a new blip for a movie that isn’t already listed on the website. It then searches for information on the web about the movie title you’ve just entered filling in automatically most information about the movie. I’m referring to movies, but the same can be done for books, music, etc.

It also takes a bit of inspiration on Digg, by allowing the user not only to comment on your blip, but to agree or disagree with it, much in the way of a thumbs up, thumbs down thing.

The site is slick and clean, the potential is huge, the approach is simple. I think we have a winner here. I’ll be using blippr from now on, if you care to get in touch just visit my profile at http://www.blippr.com/profiles/438.

As i said in the beginning Blippr is still in private beta, but you can ask for an invitation at their website, and you’ll probably get one in a couple of hours, so go ahead and try for yourself.