13.2

Now that I have had a couple of days to play with google docs and dropbox I can give some proper feedback.

Dropbox - My new best friend :)
I managed to download it at home with no problems. I've been able to add things to dropbox in two ways. Firstly by simply copy and pasting ( if I don't need a copy I can just drag across) a document from my computer into my dropbox. The other way I have put documents in there is by uploading from a different computer. At first this came up with and error message but once I changed to simple upload mode I had no problems. I have also been able to succesfully download from dropbox - I tested this out by uploading a photo from home and dowloading it at work to add to my Blog profile so now all my lovely readers can see what I look like. So far I am quite impressed with dropbox. Later I may try and see what access from a mobile phone is like just to get an idea of how user friendly it is.

Google Docs - not so friendly
 I like the fact that I don't have to remember to save the document as google docs does it automatically, which comes in handy as I am quite bad at saving I go from one extreme to the other (either saving after every line I type or not saving for ages then losing lots of work). However the problems arise when two people are viewing the document at the same time, well there isn't a problem if you are just viewing but if you are both editing it is frustrating. Myself and our systems librarian decided to give it a try earlier today - we are both at different sites so a great opprotunity to test it out. Whilst I was editing, my colleague started to write to say she could see me editing, the issue here is there is only one cursor so her message appeared in the middle of the text as I was trying to edit. We both agreed it wasn't great  if more than one person is editing at the same time but would make for a good immediate communications tool (much like a "chat" facility) if it wasn't for the one cursor issue.

On the whole if you know you aren't likely to be accessing the document at the same time it is a really simple and easy way to share documents with a group, but if more than one person is editing at a time it becomes confusing (especially as you have to fight for control of the cursor and therefore the ability to edit anything) I think it would be better if there was a faciltiy to "lock" the document whilst you edit - still allow others to view the document but not edit until you exit. This where wiki's have the advantage to a degree as each person has to take thier turn in adding to the document (or thats how it comes acroos oin the video on the Thing 13 blog).

Online Storage - the way forward
I can see all three online tools  having thier uses especially as more and more content is going online. I think its useful to use things like google docs and Drop box almost as online storage as they accessible form anywhere. This would have beeen handy when we had a powecut a couple of weeks ago, we couldn't use computers and we thought "aha we can use the laptops because they are battery powered" - but then came the realisation that no electricty = no servers too so we couldn't access any of our work. Dropbox would have been an ideal alternaive because as it is online it doesn't matter how or where you access it and the only electricty needed is that to power the device through which you access it (be that plugged in battery run).