DanLin.net

A few days ago I posted a story about Hulu and how you can embed their videos in your own blog.

I also noticed one little thing that there were more videos available if you just change the numeric id in the embed code. That led me to create a page on Premity.com, a company I started with a couple of other dudes.

A couple of people noticed the page and we even got a call from Nat Worden of TheStreet.com inquiring about our (un)association with the video startup currently it private beta. Little did we know the phone call was an interview for a post on TheStreet.com and made us out to be hackers trying to use their service to garner free publicity.

In reality, this ‘hack’ is not much of a hack at all. Since Hulu allows embedding of their videos outside of their site, even beta testers need to be able to copy and paste the embed code to their destination of choice. That meant anyone who wanted to embed the code onto their blog was free to do so. It just so happens that the video IDs are in ascending numerical order so I just made a page that randomly picks a number out of all of their currently available videos and displays the next 4.

It really is a pretty simple implementation of what Hulu intended for their beta users to be able to do so I would not really consider this a compromise at all of their beta service.

But it is a free world, so say what you will…

A couple sites who noticed our page:
Hulu’s Code Quickly Cracked
Premity Hijacks Hulu
I want a beta invite to Hulu
Private Beta Not So Private: Ad-Free Hulu Clips Disseminated

You would think after 3 months of working on a debut episode of Mahalo Daily, they would have actually put something together that’s worth watching. Instead, all they were able to muster is a ‘trailer’ to the upcoming premiere. It is a really lame one at that. Completely lacks creativity and originality. After months of work, they resorted to making a parody video of some of the most popular video podcasts. It is a huge cop-out move to get cheap laughs. I’m not even gonna post any links to the video to spare you the torture. For the masochists out there, I’m sure you will have no problems Googling it yourself…

I am usually suspect of anyone who decides to clone digg.com with ‘their own spin’ but this one is actually pretty cool. It has a very nicely designed player that you can embed anywhere and nice social features albeit trendy and overrated.

Here is their embedded top song player which is a cool feature to discover new music. You can register, login and Jigg all directly within this embeddable player which will help them grow their userbase virally.

Although their embed link feature from the player currently is broken so I had to browse the page source to find this code. That could be a problem but should be an easy fix for them.

Ever since Amazon launched it Web Services products people have been raving about its power and flexibility as well as reasonable pricing. But it is not until now has it been easy and practical enough to use for individuals thanks to services like JungleDisk.

Here is the description of their service from their own Website:

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux
* Automatically back up your important files quickly and easily

A friend of mine turned me on to the service last week and I have been playing around with it for a couple of days. So far it has worked very well but it is certainly in beta status. It is essentially a front-end for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) that makes the storage-in-a-cloud concept as transparent as possible. It literally looks like a local hard drive when it is connected. Locally cached files makes the file appear instantly on the drive while it works in the background to push it all up to Amazon’s servers without you sitting and waiting as in other services. Even if the computer crashes the service is smart enough to resume the upload when it reboots.

Where it shows as a beta product is in the feature set. Currently there is no easy way to map multiple drives using the same or different accounts. There are no privileges you can set for others to have limited access to your files or even make some of your files live on the internet via regular HTTP. Supposedly all of that will come in time at a fair price of a dollar a month or $20 a lifetime. Of course you will incur Amazon S3 charges for the storage and transfer fees but Jungle Disk isn’t seeing any of that.

Amazon S3 Pricing Structure

A typical scenario where this is extremely useful would be for someone who has a home computer as well as a work PC. You can map your Jungle Disk to both machines regardless where they are in the Internet. Files will appear in both locations just like magic. Or if you have a company with virtual employees across the world you can simply enable access to a Jungle Disk and suddenly everyone will be sharing and working on a network drive as if you are in the same network.

As a backup service it is not the cheapest around. Personally I will need close a terabyte of storage to backup my digital life and Amazon S3 will cost me around $150 a month whereas Mozy offers an unlimited backup service at $4.95/month. Where services like Mozy lacks is the transparency of file access.

I’ve been using it for just a couple of days and have been very impressed with the app. To access multiple Amazon accounts and S3 buckets I’ve even written a little script that allows me to ‘one-click’ swap between them. Let’s just hope Amazon hasn’t patented that as well…

Apparent Google Adsense thinks my Jaiku page is pretty gay. And by gay I mean blogging about horse breeding.