Peter Giger

There are two recent services/technologies I would highlight as important steps to a networking future, Dropbox and Spotify. Neither of these services primarily target the “friend space” which got practically all attention during the recent years. A friend space has been a standard feature for most web services and technologies recently. Dropbox and Spotify has some some social features but their strong side is new solutions to old problems. Dropbox is the ideal syncing service and Spotify delivers streaming music as smooth as iTunes or MS Mediaplayer.

You install Dropbox on your computer. It works cross platform for Mac, Linux and Windows. When dropbox is installed you get a folder called “dropbox” in your Finder, Nautilus, Exporer or whatever your file manager is called. Everything you put in the dropbox folder is synced with your account on the dropbox server. Lets say your are editing the document veronaproject.odt on your Mac. It’s located in the dropbox folder. As soon as you press save in the word processor, the document is synced seamlessly with the dropbox server. Next, you go to your Windows machine, open your word processor and open the same file from your dropbox folder. It’s the latest version of the document you just edited on your Mac. After that you go to your Ubuntu and edit the same document. Everything works seamlessly, without hassle. It just works.

The free version of dropbox comes with 2 GB storing, and a 50 GB paid version is available for 99 dollar / year.

Spotify looks a lot like iTunes. It is a software and service for streaming music from the Spotify server to your desktop. It works practically flawlessly. The music starts immediately and plays without any sign of streaming sickness. Spotify is like day and night compared to earlier streaming services.

Music is static for me. I don’t create music myself. I don’t have to “own” music files in the same way I have to own my document files, photos or home video files. I’m very happy to spend an amount every month on a subscription service, where all music I can imagine is available. My listening habits is registered, recalculated in dollar and distributed to the artists. I don’t have to host the files myself and I actually do something for the environment. If everyone switched to streaming music, the world would save a lot of energy in fewer hard disks -  digital storing is becoming more and more of a environmental problem in the world. Spotify is native for Mac and Windows and works well under Wine on Linux. There are both a free and a paid version. The free version is still invites only, but the paid versions is available for everyone (in some countries). It will cost you about 10 euro / month or 1 euro for 24 hours, and it’s worth every penny.

Spotify have some initial shortcomings. The most obvious shortcoming is the inability to use it on portable devices, another is that not all music is available yet. It has also been some instability in the catalog, some albums are available one day and gone the other day. This problem is due to the record companies, and will hopefully be solved as the service gets more and more attention and users. And the Spotify team is working hard to add music to the database.