Grouply and Oodle

I had a site on Grouply. It was just a little site, 163 members and not very active. It was a family history site and appreciated by all of us who are connected. We were publishing resources and finds on there.

We use to be on Ning. Ning did the dirty on us and decided to kick out the smaller non-paying sites. That was a huge event. After a lot of research I took the site over to Grouply based on their sympathy and promises they wouldn't treat us the way Ning had. The also had a system to transfer all the data over to make it easy. It wasn't a totally clean transfer, some of the info ended up in strange places, but at least it was done. We set up and settled in. Our numbers grew, quite slowly but surely.

Then Grouply told us that Oodle was buying Grouply. They were 'very excited'. I bet they were. They probably got a packet for the sale. From the:

Grouply / Oodle FAQ

"How will the acquisition affect existing Grouply Groups and users? Can we continue to create new groups?

There will be no changes. Existing Grouply social groups will continue to operate and be supported as before, and you are welcome and encouraged to create new Grouply social groups at www.grouply.com/create."

Yeah. I got an email from one of my member saying they thought the site had been deleted. !!!

The message where my site was:

"We regret to inform you that as of February 24, 2012, the Grouply service and all individual group websites built on the Grouply platform are no longer available.

When Oodle acquired Grouply in November 2010, the intent was to leverage the Grouply code base to add a community layer to the Oodle Marketplace while continuing to run Grouply as a standalone service. While the integration of Grouply with Oodle was successful, unfortunately, the economics are such that we can no longer justify supporting the Grouply service on its own.

If you are the creator or administrator of a Grouply group, you can request a copy of your group member list and select group data here."

Then you follow the link, put in the address of your site and get:

"An email has just been sent to the email addresses on file for the administrators of the group "kablemob.grouply.com/" with information on how to retrieve the group's member list. You will be able to retrieve additional group data (e.g., photos and files) by March 9, 2012. Please return to www.grouply.com at a later date to request this data."

The email didn't have any information about how to retieve the data, the member list was an attachment and that is all. The data is gone and their was no real warning.

No one is answering email or Tweets or FB posts. It's just gone. Even Ning didn't do that to us, they gave us about 3 months warning.

Personally I wouldn't go near Oodle with a pole (unless I could hit Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle, with it), and Craig, you've made 163 enemies. Very chatty enemies.

Storing online

Thing 32. Online storage. Unfortunatly but not surprisingly after 4 years the expected changes have happened. Omnidrive doesn't exist anymore. Sounded good, pity it's gone. I searched for other free online storage and settled on 4shared. It's easy to use, quite intuitive so that's lovely. I don't need any online storage at the moment but a friend is about to teach a class in Gimp soon so I suggested she have her files stored online so she can access them from the course instead of carrying them around with her. At first we were going to use the free web space that comes from my ISP but seeing as I wanted to explore online storage we started an account for her to use for the class and for me to explore and see what it can do.

Even tho it's so easy it's still a little peculiar. There's an upload link at the bottom of the page that doesn't work, you have to use the one at the top. You can't edit files online unless it's a .txt file. The working page is set up like an email account and the top folder is where the files sit. There are 12 emails waiting for you when you sign in so that is a little unexpected.

You can edit images with Picnic. Nice, also easy, not as detailed as Gimp, but very nice for an online image editor.

Bottom line? I may find a use for all this, but I'll probably shop around a bit more and find one that has editing of more file types.

Skipping

I'm not doing thing 31 because I don't like doing organising on the net. I'm doing this blog with a nic - I organise my life under my name. They don't cross over. And under my own name I don't organise myself via the net. Maybe one day. I use outlook calendar on my work puter and my own smart phone which for 'security' reasons I can't syncronise. I do miss the synch - had it in my last job via a work provided blackberry, but it's not happing in this job, via the net, or with this nic!

Is that a cat, cow or cusion??

thing 30



Yah, I just like this

Scrapblogging Kable

Thing 29

I feel like this is very silly, but I did have trouble coming up with a subject for a scrapblog. I also don't feel like I'm very much of a designer. I know how scrapblog works now, and I guess that's the main thing. I tell myself...

http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=2951984

Wired!

Thing 28
Probably a reflection of how I feel today:



It's not very clear but that is my eye, severely Gimped

Playing with gadgets

A new thing! I've been trying to email to my blogs from my regular phone but there's something wrong with the settings that I've never been able to solve. I can email home only. Delightfully, my work gave me a Blackberry and the plan is unlimited emails! Wow - can email my blogs!

Sent via Blackberry!