Private drawings only for paid accounts?

If you, the Dabbleboard staff, are not happy about "regressing" your privacy features, then think how much more unhappy we, your users, feel. It's very hard for me to believe your suggestion that you are doing this because your users are upset that you are giving too much away for free.

Dabbleboard is a great service, but many of us would never even have tried it, if it weren't for the privacy option. You led us to believe this was a standard feature of the free account; but now you want to take it away. That's not good for Dabbleboard's reputation and it obviously will make most of your users unhappy and leave them wondering if they can depend on the continued use of your other features.

Google Docs, Zoho, Thinkfree, and many other free services all protect the privacy of their users' documents. Imagine if they suddenly announced that they were going to make all their users' documents public unless users paid them not to do so! A Dabbleboard drawing document deserves the same protection as any other document.

If the idea of regressing makes users unhappy and also, as you say above, makes you unhappy, there's a simple way out: don't do it.

At the absolute *minimum*, you should maintain the privacy of existing drawings, and whenever a user creates a new drawing, you should display an alert that warns the user that the new document will *not* be private.

That sounds fine. The main thing to avoid is taking data that was private when a customer created it and making it public. The public-by-default approach for new drawings is fine, as long as it's obvious to the user that their work will be public. I also think that limits on the amount of storage space on free accounts are perfectly reasonable.

I agree with Preston completely.

Hi, just wondering why anyone would want to have access or view my personal drawing !

- they would not make sence to them

- they would not know the story behind them

- they would no realise the voice chat that was occuring while the srawing was being made.

Why not just make the fee account limited in disk space and keep everything private ?

thanks

I note that this topic is six months old. I hope it has not yet been resolved.

I work as a professional English tutor in a university library. I'm also the tech-coordinator or technical advisor to the Writing Center. As such, I'm always on the lookout for new and useful programs and web-apps to add to the Writing Center toolbox...

We see around 1,500 clients per semester in the Writing Center.
About two-thirds of them are undergraduates from all disciplines.
The remaining third are graduate students, international students, and the university faculty.

As a senior tutor, I deal mostly with grad students, international students, and faculty.

Over the last two weeks I've been researching free mind-mapping programs and applications in order to determine which one(s) the tutors at the writing center should introduce our clients to.

My criteria for assessment were:
- Free
- Ability to Save and Open Documents
- Ease of Use
- User Control of Document Layout
- Ability to Export Documents
- Appearance

I found and experimented with around 15 mind-mapping tools... After playing with all of them, I determined that I didn't like any of the interfaces, and that what I really wanted was a program that let me draw squares, ovals, and circles, write text in the shapes, and draw arrows and lines anywhere I wanted. I also wanted the appearance of the drawing to be bold, simple, and clear. At this point I found Dabbleboard and was ecstatic.

I showed it to the various faculty I've been working with, who were preparing for their Third-Year-Review, or for their 5th-Year Tenure Review, or who were brainstorming and writing professional academic articles and presentations. I also showed it to the Masters and Ph.D. students who were working on their theses or dissertations. Everyone was very excited and immediately began using Dabbleboard.

My point here is this: All of the people I know who are most interested in Mind-Mapping and Whiteboard programs are higher-level academics, either graduate students, Ph.D. students, or professors who are working on presentations or publications. We're all working on highly confidential projects.

I didn't have 'confidentiality' on my list of assessment criteria simply because it never occurred to me that any company would deliberately expose the work of its clients.

I assume removing document confidentiality is a topic because the Dabbleboard company is trying to increase its profit-margin, hopefully because it's always desirable to increase profit, and not because of financial difficulty, because Dabbleboard is truly a great application.

However, if my own work on Dabbleboard were not confidential, I would have to immediately cease using the application. I would be sad, because I really like the interface and the appearance, but I simply can't afford to have my work automatically shared with the whole world. Additionally, I know that none of the professors, grad-students, or Ph.D. students I've been working with can afford to have their own research, their publication ideas, their dissertation figures, or any other document they're working on for their academic careers exposed to the eyes of the world before they've published.

This would be unfortunate because the majority of the people I've just mentioned are teachers. Many of them are working on integrating Web 2.0 applications, such as Dabbleboard, into the assignments and content of their classes... regardless of their area... since mind-mapping is a very potent tool for organization, brainstorming, and also for communication and presentation of ideas. My point now is that we, the teachers, are looking for mind-mapping programs to endorse, and to share with our students... Right now, Dabbleboard is on the top of my list for applications to disseminate and spread awareness about... but I'll have to pick something else if private documents are disallowed to free users.

For one thing, I'm not going to 'require' any student to purchase any particular software, so I couldn't recommend any application that they can't learn how to use for free. Additionally, I would never have tried Dabbleboard for more than five minutes if I was unable to save documents as a free user.

Above, you say: "We hope we can build a solid library of content that many people -especially teachers and students- can benefit from."

Actually, when I saw the public library, I had the same thought. What a useful thing Dabbleboard would become for spreading knowledge about theory, philosophy, science, and education... if people generated clear and concise mind-maps and made them public. Of course, a tagging or labeling system, and perhaps a user-rating system, tied to this would make it even more useful. So, looking at the public library, I was filled with optimism and hope for humanity....

However, when I was unable to remove a document I had made public from the library, I was filled with irritation. I wanted to improve the document, and not to leave the clumsy, in-progress draft to clutter the public-library... but I couldn't find a way to do that... Personally, I would like to be able to 'tag' my own documents as 'public' and to remove that tag whenever I wanted. While my document is public, anyone would be able to copy it and make their own variant or changes. It would also be neat/useful if people could 'reply' to someone else's public document, with another document... or even with 'comments'...

In terms of limiting the free-services, and therefore the profit-less expenditure of the company, I feel medicalstudent's comment is very good: "Why not just make the fee account limited in disk space and keep everything private?"

If my ability to store my documents was limited in some way, by number of documents, or size of documents, or elements in documents, or disk-space-requirements of documents... then I would continue to use Dabbleboard, with no complaint (well, with limited complaints), and continue to spread the word about it... I wouldn't feel the least bit put-out, or irritated, by limited storage. However, as I continued to use Dabbleboard, I would probably inevitably convince myself to upgrade to a paid account (depending on your rates, which I don't remember right now). Furthermore, the professors and other upper-level researchers, writers, and academics who planned on making Dabbleboard mind-maps and diagrams part of their own professional tool-kits... to create educational tools and diagrams or figures for their publications... they would probably happily upgrade as well... once they were addicted. However, none of us will bother with learning to use Dabbleboard if we can't start off with useful and effective functionality, without having to pay...

In the long run, I feel that removing non-paying users' ability to store private documents will horribly injure your long-term user-base. People who are working on educational documents may not mind having their documents automatically made public, but anyone needing to keep their documents confidential until they publish will simply use another program and never bother with Dabbleboard long enough to grow to love it.

Additionally, while I think the idea of a public library is wonderful and a step forward for humanity... I think that cluttering it up with useless drawings, scribbles, and partially finished documents will make the public library merely a public junk-yard... it will be too difficult to find useful or impressive content in the morass of poorly organized or half-finished works... Really, users should be able to remove and re-edit their 'public' documents, to make sure the quality continuously improves... If users skim through the public library of images and find enlightening and fantastically clear and useful documents... they'll feel inspired to 'compete' by creating their own... especially if comments, a tagging system, and user-ratings are enabled...

Well, that's what I think.

-- Erik

"For now we've decided not to go ahead with this change. I.e. drawings of all users, including those with free accounts, will be private. Hope that's a relief to you :)."

that is indeed a relief! :-)
the "For now" part worries me though ... :-(

I think that limiting the storage or number of drawings makes good sense
for free accounts.