PC Magazine has been publishing a digital edition since 2002, but at least in its current version, this digital edition only imitates the print version in its layout, which is definitely not the easiest and most convenient way to read text. Also, the problem for print magazines is not the fact that they are physical objects, but simply the fact that a publication which only appears once a month will always lag behind its online competition, especially in a fast moving business like technology news.

A number of publishers have been experimenting with digital editions similar to PC Magazine's. The New York Times, for example, has its Times Reader application, which allows offline access to the paper. However, in a world where online access is becoming ubiquitous, these products are at best bridges to a pure online experience.

PC Magazine, of course, already has a strong online presence and a number of very interesting blogs and online video shows. The value of PC Magazine often wasn't in its news content anyway, but in its reviews - all of which are available online, without the need to subscribe to a digital edition of the magazine.

Would You Subscribe to a Digital Edition?

While we are glad to see that a quality publication like PC Magazine is taking steps to secure its future, it is not clear to us why PC Magazine would put time and effort into producing a digital edition of its magazine instead of just focusing on the online experience.

On the other hand, at least this time we get to blame the bricks-and-mortar people, and not the other way around.

More Noise to Signal

Hello, which was part of Google's 2004 acquisition of Picasa, seems to have been neglected in recent years. According to Compete, Hello's traffic has fallen by over 50% year-over-year, and Wikipedia says that Hello shut down its "Bloggerbot IM" service in favor of Picasa's "Blog This" function in 2006.

The Hello team encourages users to use Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Talk, and it seems likely that redundancy is what killed Hello. Google Talk already has file sharing and Picasa albums are viewable within the chat client (though Google Talk doesn't encrypt files and chats the way Hello did). Could we see tighter integration between Picasa and Google Talk now that Hello is out of the picture? And more importantly, what will Google do with such a cool domain?

As a start, I decided to send Nik an email and ask for his response - because Clay's post had some serious allegations. Here is Nik's response:

"The domain is up but it is taking a while for the DNS change to propagate. It all started when I tried to change registrars in time before the domain expiration, and I put the transfer request through (to godaddy) and even though there was a confirmation it was never completed. The renewal went through last night, and from here I can see the site again but I can understand if it will take another 24 hours or so.

As for Clay's comments - it is unfortunate that he posted what he did in a public forum, as it doesn't help my efforts or his efforts. I think Clay was well aware of the risks of angel investing and was more than willing to ride the situation to a sucessful outcome, but now that he feels that we aren't doing so well looks to make a quick exit. You can't have an angel investment where you can take all the positives, but as soon as there is a negative decide to take a risk-less way out and pull your money back. You either ride up or ride down. I did contact clay and respond to his email enquiry, and was hoping to convince him to help me through, but I didn't hear anything back. He specifically asked me not to call him, which I didn't. I don't think it is particularly constructive for him to vent publically, or for there to be knee-jerk reactions to any and every error experienced on the site.

At the moment I am in the process of (along with 2 part-time developers who are helping out) of testing and rolling out a new version of the app. We ripped out our own backend and are utilizing third-party storage services, as our biggest cost has been the hardware we have had to opperate (and bandwidth bills). We first talked about this a year ago, and it has taken since around December to get the development to this point. Atm parts of it are live, and we are utilizing S3, google and a few other services for the storage-end (the users decide which services to use)."

What to make of all this? While I give credit to Nik for responding to RWW's enquiries, I would guess that Clay Cook and others who have been burned by Omnidrive's fate will not be satisfied by it. What's more, there are a lot of unhappy users, judging by what I saw of the Omnidrive forums before the domain issue.

Perhaps we are beginning to see some of the downsides to web 2.0 here. I've met Nik several times and found him to be an intelligent, likeable guy. I can certainly understand why people invested in Omnidrive, as it was a promising company.

Yet it's ended up a sad story. The online storage market, as we've pointed out before, became very tough once Amazon, Google and Microsoft all entered it. This story in many ways represents the 'other side' of the web 2.0 era - promising startup, the market didn't quite pan out, yikes the angels and early employees lose out big time. No bigco buyout, more like a bigco bury.

Normally that'd be the end of the story - deadpool is the phrase that has become common in describing such a mess. The strange thing here is that the Omnidrive story isn't over yet. Clay Cook and others have money owing to them, and have been loudly claiming that Omnidrive has done them wrong. Nik Cubrilovic indicated in his email that he's done nothing wrong, and what's more claimed that he is still desperately trying to make the company work. Which do you believe?

The site then went down in January, which Cubrilovic said was due to a failed hard drive. "We had a new server up within hours and we restored backups of the site, and it is up-and-running again," he wrote in comments on a post at WebWorkerDaily. "I am really sorry for the inconvenience to our users of not being able to access the main site, although the actual Omnidrive servers were not affected at all and you would not have had any problems accessing your accounts."

We've been getting emails all winter from irate customers asking us to find out what's up at Omnidrive. Without a domain name, it would appear that the troubled company is finally ready to join the deadpool.

Note: we promise we didn't plan for this to be the day of dead companies.

UPDATE: Please see this post for a continuation of the Omnidrive saga.