Reactive Software Blog

Although we’re called Reactive Software, a company that provides reactive solutions (i.e. we clean up the mess after it has already happened to you by recovering the data) we always recommend our customers to take proactive steps to prevent coming to us in the first place by following three important steps:

1. Backup your data
2. Secure your data and your connections
3. Use the password manager and remember only one complex password to all your other passwords (don’t do this if you suffer from amnesia! use paper in that case)

Today I would like to cover the first of the three most important proactive measures to make your life painless: Data Backup.

Note: this is a not a review of data backup products. We will write about one specific solution that we think would fit best any home user (an ideal solution for all devices in the whole house actually).

Live Mesh from the Windows Live team is a “cloud” system that sits on your PC (Mac & Windows Mobile coming soon) in the background and watches the folders that you want to be kept safe (backed up) for any changes. Once you change something (add new document, remove a file, change a document) Live Mesh will automatically synchronise the changes with the remote server. The data is stored on the remote server under your Live Desktop account (under your Windows Live account) so no one else can see your data. You can also add other computers (and folders from them) to your Live Desktop space. Soon, you will be able to add your Windows Mobile and Mac devices.

The beauty of this system is that it’s real fast and easy to set-up the automatic backup on all your machines. The backup is done to a remote server (=to another disk) via a secure connection (encrypted channel) so if any of your machines die together with the disks, the folders that you added to your Live Desktop will remain safe and accessible from your Live Desktop or from other machines where you have Live Mesh client installed.

All you need to do is:

1. Download and install Live Mesh client on all machines from where you want to backup your data
2. Right-click on each folder that you want to be backed up and select “Add folder to your Live Mesh…”

That’s it! The rest will be performed by Live Mesh client upon doing any changes to your folders.

All of this comes for free. Similar backup solution would cost you hundreds of dollars because you would have to purchase not only a good piece of software but might also need a separate disk drive or a storage device to prevent data loss in the likely event of hardware death or accidental data deletion.

Apart from being able to backup your folders to a remote location, Live Mesh also allows you to gain remote access to any of your machines that are on-line from anywhere in the world (you simply sign into you Live Desktop with your Windows Live account). It also allows you to invite your family or friends into you Live Desktop to see and synchronise photos, documents and other data with their computers.

Limitations?
I didn’t notice anything significant that will stop this service being popular. 5 GB space is given.
Because of the 5 GB space limitation, we would recommend this as a backup solution for everything but photos and videos (it is fine for sharing selected photos or videos though).
Photos and videos take huge amount of space and therefore need a different backup solution. We will talk about this in a later blog post.

Now onto real-life examples:
I currently have two machines at home: I use a notebook (EUGENE-HOME in the screenshot above) and my wife uses a desktop (ELENA-HOME). We have a folder with all the family paperwork on the desktop computer (Documents folder). I manage my websites on the laptop (sites folder). I also chose to backup my Favorites and my Firefox Bookmarks (bookmarkbackups folder).

The folders are set to synchronise with the server only (fresh server copy of every file is available at any time). If one of the computers fails, I will synchronise the needed folder from the server to the working machine.

I have tested the system under Windows Vista and Windows XP both in Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Although still in Tech Preview mode the system is very stable (never crashed) and works fine on the tested platforms.
The sign-up to the service is free but is available only to some of the countries (US & UK are on the list) during the Tech Preview phase.

If you don’t have a Windows Live account, you can use your existing email address to sign-up for a Windows Live ID (it will be your email address).

Update, 3 Dec’08: The service is still in beta so use this software at your own risk. We have been testing Live Mesh for a while and the software is very stable. The only thing it can’t digest properly at this point is files that get updated extremely often (e.g. Thunderbird mail data files.

Related links:

• Sign-up for Live Mesh
• Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh
• Live Mesh team blog

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What is YouTube Hotspot?

At first, I thought YouTube team has invented something like this but for videos (HeatMaps):

At least the name of the feature gave me a similar hint.
It seems YouTube team has finally released an equivalent to Bounce Rate indicator (available in Google Analytics) but for videos:

I was puzzled by the graph and by the feature. The text at the top doesn’t bring much clarity:
The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. Above the average line, your video is hot: it’s retaining more viewers than average and they may be rewinding to watch that point again. Below the average line, your video’s gone cold: viewers are not rewinding or may be leaving the video faster than the average.

The easier way to understand this, is to understand the Bounce Rate first: it’s a way to measure the drop-out rate for any website. Bounce Rate of 75% means that 75% of people left the website after viewing the single first page on that website.
YouTube HotSpot graph shows the percentage of people that left the video at any given moment of time comparing to other videos (of similar length).

How does this help YouTube authors?

For the majority of the ones who post amateur cellphone “streetracing” videos it doesn’t mean anything.
Some of us who care about the effectiveness of what we do this is a great tool to analyse the user reaction on the video and correct any mistakes to make users watch our video until the end. Correcting mistakes is still very difficult because there is no way to replace the video. If you understand that your video needs to be improved to reduce the drop-out rate, you will have to delete the current video and upload a new version. This can be very negative:

• All references to your old version will be broken (e.g. you old video that is embedded at third-party websites will be broken)
• The old version (older than 2 months) was indexed. You will lose all your precious traffic for at least two months until your new version gets into the Google indexes properly
• Moreover, just like with everything else related to optimization, improving the video takes a lot of testing and means you’re likely to re-upload more than once

Wouldn’t it be great if YouTube had a function to replace the video file without losing the indexed page, the references and links?

By the way, the graph at the beginning of the post is real. What do you think it shows?
I interpret it this way: The video is effective and keeps users engaged until the end of the video. The “below average” chunk at the beginning shows that irrelevant viewers are filtered out right away (they understand this video is not interesting for them and leave).

I am sure there’s more to come on the YouTube Analytics front, so stay tuned!

Related links:

• Hot Spot announcement on Official Google Blog

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Some time ago we wrote about the new feature in Google that allows to see several political videos with automatically generated speech transcripts. I was correct when I said Google is soon to index all sound and videos using the speech recognition technology. Just couple of days ago they announced a new service called GAudi that lets users search for text inside videos. So far, search can only be done within a limited subset of videos but the service is still in the “lab” stage and I am sure there’s more to come (e.g. all videos on the net transcribed and indexed).

Several folks have indicated that the speech recognition algorithms currently used by Google are not unique and can lead to some embarrassing moments BUT this is where I think the recently announced Closed Captions feature of YouTube will come into play.
If you know a little about the insides of the speech recognition and translation algorithms (one can argue they are the same if looked at from machine point of view) you will definitely know that the most advanced algorithms use the learning technique (Google Translation service as an example). This is when two sets of data representing the same thing are fed into the algorithm (e.g. same text in English and Spanish) and the algorithm improves upon itself with every new set of data that it gets based on the learnings from that dataset comparison.
Speech recognition and Closed Captions is exactly what Google needs as two corresponding sets of data that can be used to improve the speech recognition quality!
By providing Closed Captions for your YouTube video you will also help Google to correctly transcribe every single word in your video.
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We continue our series of How-To videos covering various aspects of MSN password protection and recovery. The best way to protect your MSN password is to understand how attackers steal them i.e. what methods, techniques and tools are used by hackers to steal MSN passwords:

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Next in a series of videos about handling your MSN passwords we cover some methods that attackers use to hack MSN passwords. We also show the tools that hackers use to for MSN password hacking:

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We continue to post our fresh How-To videos on various aspects of handling MSN passwords. Today we show you how to find your MSN password if you come to I forgot my MSN password situation:

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This is a second video that we dedicate to explaining how to find your lost or forgotten MSN passwords and how to download MSN password finder:

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We’ve prepared a short video that guides through the password changing process for MSN. We cover cases when you don’t remember your old password (you need it to change MSN password to the new one).
This is a first in a series video about the MSN network and MSN Messenger called Change MSN password:

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We see this question popping up too frequently so we thought it would be a good idea to prepare an FAQ post on this topic.

Changing Facebook password is very simple. Below are 5 simple steps to change my Facebook password (your Facebook password). If you don’t want to read, scroll down to watch the Change Facebook Password How-to video.

1. Start on www.facebook.com
2. Login with your current password
3. On the next page click on the “account” link in the top right hand corner:
4. Click on the “change” link in the Password section on the new Edit Account page that you will see.
5. You will be asked to type in your old Facebook password and then type in your new Facebook password twice. Click on “Change Password” button once you’re done entering old and new Facebook passwords

Here’s the video: go to Facebook, change password:

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As reported in the Official Google Blog yesterday, “With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed”.

What does this mean for Video SEO?

I have seen a few blog posts on how to “create your own how-to videos” that recommend adding at least a soundtrack to your video if you’re shy to narrate it.
Well, now there is another reason that will make you want to add the speech to your video. Sooner or later, the YouTube speech recognition spider will start going further than Politician channels. Your videos are next and guess what? The text that will be recognized inside your video will for sure benefit your rankings provided of course that the speech inside is relevant to the subject that you’re optimising for.

Google is slowly building an alternative to old-fashioned text-based website indexing. Annotations are added, speech-to-text recognition is coming anytime soon. What’s next?

Update 18 Sept 2008: As predicted, couple of days back Google announced audio search service called GAudi based on the speech recognition technologies. There is a good discussion point about this new service at ReelSEO.

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