We've had the two most successful software products in history: what makes you think there will be a third?

I am so enamored with Confluence that I decided to use it as my own personal wiki. I was hoping Atlassian had a hosted solution for a small number of users, but unfortunately their hosted solutions start at $150/month.

Confluence was built as locally installable software, and Atlassian's hosted offering is simply a service to maintain a Confluence instance on your behalf. Unlike true SaaS systems like SalesForce, Confluence wasn't built from the ground up as a multi-tenant hosted service.

But what Atlassian does offer is a $10 host-it-yourself starter license for up to 10 users with full support. Proceeds from which are donated to charity. Considering the quality of Atlassian software, this is a great deal. The drawback is, well, you have to host the software yourself, which isn't for the faint of heart.

Since I already have a Linode virtual server, which, BTW, I'm very pleased with, I didn't think it would be a big deal to install Confluence onto that server. Unfortunately, for commercial software, I found the install to be more time consuming than I would have expected, so I documented my install procedure for those who want to take advantage of Atlassian's starter license in an inexpensive Linux virtual hosting environment.

Note: the instructions are now in the wiki itself.

I was contacted by their support and I told them I wasn't happy with the new rate, but they reassured me that if I moved a bunch of code and deleted some repositories my billing would be decreased from $21 per month to $6.99. The higher rate was based on the large number or repos I had. I was willing to put up with the hassle of moving my data to save a little money. It seemed like no big deal, until my account was shut off last weekend with no way to access my data.

I can't tell you how infuriating this experience was. I eventually checked all my records, and to make a long story short, they botched the billing of their new plans and had my account delinquent although I had been paying them right along.

Even after squaring up the billing (and actually receiving a refund for being OVERcharged), I insisted on getting a dump of my repos. This is where it gets really weird. They said if I canceled my account they would provide a dump of my data, but if I stayed with them, it would be $100.00. I've never heard of any company providing an incentive to fire them, so what do you think I did? I got my data and fired them. Fortunately I have never lost any data using hosted services, but this is the worst experience I've had.

I am firm believer in application hosting and I advocate these services to our clients, but now I understand what it is like to be on the other side and not able to access my own data. It is a queasy feeling. I am now much more sympathetic to clients who have concerns, and it gives me new incentive to provide an increased level of transparency for our customers' data. The problem is a few bad experiences like this, puts all data and application hosters on the defense.

I recorded a quick podcast tonight. No big picture ideas, just some discussion on email, calendaring, and task management geekery.

At work I am stuck using Exchange even though Gmail is my mail application of choice. Fortunately a new feature in Gmail (ok it isn't that new; it came out in July, but I just heard about it) which enables it to send email out through third party SMTP servers has made my life much better. It makes it possible to send all my email from Exchange to my gmail account. The only draw back is that Gmail polls our Exchange server using POP3, so emails aren't updated instantly.

I then push my email and calendar to my new iPhone using Gmail's Exchange Active Sync. It is a strange world we are living in when an Apple product talks to a Google service, using a Microsoft protocol.

Finally, I tie my Google calendar together with my Exchange calendar using the Google Calendar Sync program which is a desktop application. Blah, now that's a hack. Why Google doesn't offer a web service to do this is beyond me. Maybe there is a technical reason I don't understand.

I am back to using todoist for task management, but haven't found a great iPhone solution there. I also briefly discuss multi-tasking on the iPhone, and the reason I bought an iPhone over the Motorola Droid. Simple things like scrolling web pages are still glitchy on Android. Plus when Android phones start shipping on AT&T this spring, it will be possible to use both platforms on the same carrier. Thus far my experience with AT&T has been fine.