MediaFire Blog

Hi everyone,

It’s the start of a new week and back to business as usual here at MediaFire – which means the team is hard at work on more updates and improvements to the site. Today we released another update to the codebase with some very cool new enhancements.

Enhancement 1: HTML5 localStorage
The biggest enhancement that I have to report is that we’ve enabled HTML5 localStorage for browsers that support it. We’re using this technology to cache most of the file and folder data for your My Files page on your computer, greatly increasing the speed of browsing though your files. This means that My Files pages and folder pages load almost instantaneously for most users. This feature is only available to registered users (pro and non-pro) and can be managed through the My Account -> Persistent Storage control panel.

Enhancement 2: “Save File to Account” target folder selection
This one is pretty straight forward. Sometimes when you receive a file you might just want to store it in your MediaFire account rather than download it to you computer. MediaFire has let you do this for some time now, but now we make it possible for you to select the destination where you want to save it.

Enhancement 3: Linked-folder content now updates “real-time”
Like the rest of the contents of your MyFiles pages, now linked-folders also update in “real-time” (every 30 seconds). Since linked-folders are folders that are shared between MediaFire accounts, now any changes made by one of the linked users will be seen by everyone else who’s linked almost immediately without having to refresh their files list in the browser.

As always, let us know what you think! We’re working on some other cool new products so keep your eyes out for a soft-launch sometime soon.

Tom Langridge – Co-Founder, Corporate Communications

Recently there has been extensive media coverage of the United States Government’s shut down of MegaUpload.com which has drawn attention to the entire cloud storage market as a whole. While I can’t speak to the allegations against MegaUpload, I’d like to just take this opportunity to clarify some misconceptions about MediaFire that I’ve seen recently.

We welcome any former MegaUpload users who want to legitimately store, access, and share their data on our cloud storage service. We caution new users to read our Terms of Service carefully and understand that MediaFire takes violations of our Terms of Service very seriously.

MediaFire offers a free, secure, and unlimited cloud storage service for users to upload and share data with their customers, colleagues, friends, and family. MediaFire’s Professional and Business plans offer uploaders additional functionality like company branding tools, analytics tools, and multi-seat employee accounts.

MediaFire’s premium services are based on a user’s ability to upload data and pay to distribute it. This storage and sharing model is similar to Akamai, Amazon S3, YouSendIt, etc. MediaFire has no caps or restrictions for downloading data and each upload is limited to a maximum size of 200MB for non-premium users.

Most importantly, people choose MediaFire because it offers high quality services that are simple to use and extremely powerful. We incorporate the latest HTML5 technologies, the most advanced user interfaces, and are constantly expanding our services with features requested by businesses and professionals. In Q2 2012, MediaFire will redefine how people access and manage their data and how they interact with the cloud by releasing long-in-development desktop and mobile applications that solve problems Microsoft, Dropbox, and Box fail to address.

A little more about MediaFire:

MediaFire was founded in 2006 and is based near Houston, Texas. MediaFire is used by people at 86% of Fortune 500 companies and is currently ranked in the top 100 websites globally by Amazon’s Alexa and Google/DoubleClick’s Ad Planner services.

Thanks again everyone, especially to our fans who we’ve heard loud and clear evangelizing the benefits of our service. It’s easy for us to get caught up in building our technology and services and we haven’t spent enough time espousing our own benefits and differentiators. The cloud is an incredibly convenient and powerful tool for many professionals, businesses and individuals. At MediaFire, we are committed to continuing to innovate on this technology and provide it to our users in new, simple, ethical and cost effective ways.

Tom Langridge – Co-Founder, Corporate Communications

Today MediaFire joins millions of Internet users, entrepreneurs and the growing number of responsible internet companies including Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, Mozilla and Yahoo in opposition to the proposed HR3261 (SOPA) and S968 (PIPA). These two proposed legislations – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – jeopardize the freedom, innovation and economic opportunity that the Internet enables and would seriously damage the free and open Internet itself.

Many websites will be going offline today. We sympathize and respect their decision to do so, but it’s not the right way to protest for us. As always, we will continue to provide you with access to your files and file sharing system. As such, we are instead joining the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement by encouraging all of our users to take all available actions to help stop these legislations from passing and displaying a banner across all of our pages and linking to AmericanCensorship.org – a simple and informative website by a non-profit working to defend online freedom.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th and time is of the essence to stop this bill from passing. SOPA and PIPA are too dangerous to revise and must be stopped entirely. We urge you to join us by contacting your local representatives and requesting that they vote NO on PIPA and SOPA.

Learn More:

• FightForTheFuture.org Informative Video
• AmericanCensorship.org Infographic
• Growing Chorus of Opposition to SOPA
• Open Letter against SOPA from 83 Prominent Internet Engineers
• Why SOPA and Protect IP (PIPA) are Bad, Bad Ideas (Techdirt)
• SOPA Wikipedia entry
• SOPA FAQ (CNET)
• Information on H.R.3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act at OpenCongress.org
• Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act at OpenCongress.org
• Google Infographic and Petition
• Craigslist’s Response to SOPA and PIPA
• Wikipedia’s Response to SOPA and PIPA

Get Involved:

• Reddit /r/sopa
• Take Action Checklist at Stop American Censorship.
• Contact Your Representative with info and a widget to find them by EFF and Wired for Change.
• Senators of the 112th Congress
• Helpful info on making phone calls to your Senator or Representative.
• SOPAOpera.org keeps track of where your Congressmembers stand on PROTECT-IP and SOPA.
• Google Infographic and Petition
• Outside the US? Sign Petition Opposing US Censorship of Global Sites (EFF)
• Reverse Robocall ALL pro-SOPA MOC + Key Lobbyists (More info on Ars Technica)

From all of us here at MediaFire to all of you and yours – Happy New Year, everyone!

Here are some tips you can use with MediaFire to help you stay better organized in 2012:

Archive old files

Information overload isn’t just a catch-phrase. The longer you have your system, the more stuff you collect on your hard drive.  It’s your the growing collection of digital pictures from your ever increasing in megapixles digital camera, or your music collection that spans decades of your changing tastes.  A great way to reduce this load on your system and your brain is to archive these files off onto a separate storage location, freeing up hard-drive space and clearing out distractions.  With MediaFire’s unlimited storage, you can upload all those old files into folders you create in your account, and then delete the data from your local computer without fear of losing quick access to your files.

Use consistent methods for file and folder naming

When creating your file structure on MediaFire, it’s important to develop a naming scheme for the files you most commonly use and then stick to it.  Clear folder names and structures will help you find your data later and save you lots of time in the long run.  Consider folder structures that mirror folders on your desktop to make it easier for you to remember where your archived files might be.

Keep names short

Even though MediaFire allows you to create long folder names, in general it is a good practice to avoid doing so.  Long folder and file names are harder to read and clutter up your interface.  Instead, let your folder structure do some of the naming for you.  For a file named 2012 New Years Resolutions Weight Loss Weight Tracking Spreadsheet.xls you can build a structure like this:

Store like with like

Keeping your files organized in your folders by file type makes it easier for you to find your files and better utilize some of MediaFire’s viewing and sharing tools.  For example, if you keep all of your image files for a project or event together in a folder, you can easily view and share them as an image gallery by clicking the image gallery tab.

Hope these tips help you get a great start on 2012! Cheers!

Tom Langridge – Co-Founder, VP Corporate Communications

This past weekend was the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, and now we’re all back at MediaFire after spending quality time with our families and eating delicious home-cooked food until we all passed out. The holiday weekend allowed us plenty of time to think back on MediaFire’s past 5+ years of innovation and appreciate the amazing support our users and fans have given us along the way. This year has been yet another exciting one. We’ve continued to grow by leaps and bounds and just released a huge update to the site. We’re continuing to innovate to bring you more of what you’re asking for – I can’t say just what yet, but you’ll like it, I promise!

If you’re thankful for MediaFire, we would be incredibly honored and appreciative if you could take a brief moment to nominate MediaFire as the Best Cloud Service for the upcoming 5th Annual Crunchie Awards. If you haven’t heard of the Crunchie Awards, that’s okay. It’s an awards ceremony for innovative websites that, for the most part, only people in the web development industry are excited about. If you have heard of them, you know that even just a nomination for MediaFire would be a great accolade for us, and would help more people find our services.

You can vote here once per day until the end of the day on Dec 13th, 2011, so if you really really really love us, you can actually vote 16 times as of today!

Thanks again for all your help and support. Nominations or not, we’re thankful for everything you’ve helped us with, including just using our service and giving us the feedback we need to continue to improve it.

To all those who celebrated this past weekend, we hope you had a great Thanksgiving and you’re back from your travels safe and sound.

Cheers!

Tom Langridge – Co-Founder, Corporate Communications

Today we’re excited to announce the release of the newest version of our MediaFire platform. We’ve been calling this the “Spock” release internally but this marks the fifth major update to our website and services. Everyone here is really excited to hear your feedback as we continue to improve the various services we are now offering.

This update marks a major milestone for MediaFire and is the result of months of feedback and suggestions, testing and refinement, and is largely thanks to the continued input of our users and fans.

As such, we’ve developed an entirely new and more user-friendly and simplified interface that emphasizes easy sharing and file management. Important menu bar items are now persistently located at the top of your browser window for fast access. We’ve simplified and cleaned up our download pages to make it easier to get your downloads quickly. We’ve also greatly improved the speed that our pages load, even on slow Internet connections.

My Files

If you’ve already been managing a lot of files on your My Files page, you’ll immediately notice a lot of updates and improvements in the new interface.

• My Files data is loaded on demand and in the background instead of when the page first loads. On the previous version of MediaFire, you had to wait for all data to be loaded before accessing your files. Now your page is loaded immediately and your current view is show almost instantly.
• My Files data now loads 200% faster due to a re-architecture of our data structures. This architecture update also saves memory on the client computer and makes it possible to display and search files and folders more quickly than ever before.
• Right-click menu support is now enabled within your My Files page, making it easier to directly manage your files and folders from within the file list.
• Pagination has been removed, all files and folders are now automatically load as you scroll down the screen.
• Real-time updates now occur when a file or folder is added or changed in your account. Any changes will be inserted into your current view (if you are in the same folder) and a status message will notate the change or deletion. This occurs in 30 second intervals.
• Image view has been completely redesigned to make navigation persistent in both views and make managing images and folders much easier.
• Recently created folders now show up at the top of your My Files page with a blue line denoting they are new and making them easier to find and access.
• Keyboard shortcuts have been added such as “N” for new folder and “U” for upload.
• Forward and Back browser buttons now work within the file manager.

Sharing

Sharing has always been at the core of what makes MediaFire such a useful service and we have some exciting updates and new features that make it even easier to share files with friends, family, and colleagues.

• Linked folders are now supported. When someone shares a folder with you, you can save the folder to your account and instead of it being a one time copy of the data, the folder is linked to your account and you will automatically receive any updates that occur within it.
• Multi-Share is a new feature that allows you to share multiple specific files with a single URL. This is extremely useful if you want to share 5 photos in a directory of 500 photos. Instead of sharing them individually you can now get a single link to share just those 5 photos.
  • Multi-Share is now supported directly from the upload tool, effectively giving you one link for all the files you uploaded instead of having to share numerous links.
• Multi-Share is enabled when you select more than 1 file on your My Files page. All you have to do is select multiple files and then click the standard “Share” button which will give you one link to share all the files.
• Sharing box/pop-up has been redesigned to be much simpler.

Uploader

Ok, great, so now it’s a lot easier to share files, but how about getting them on MediaFire in the first place? We’ve made some really exciting updates to our upload tools too!

• Improved reliability – browsers that support hashed uploads are more reliable, we compare the hash of the file on your computer to the hash of the file our system receives. If they do not match, the data was corrupted and it will automatically re-upload.
• Uploads are faster than ever.
• Multi-session uploads are now supported. When you upload into multiple folders its now treated as multiple sessions. In the previous version of MediaFire you could only see one of the uploads being performed. Now you can actually select which upload session to view and/or cancel/modify.
• Drag and drop uploads on the My Files page do not open the upload window upon completion.
• Recently uploaded files show up at the top of your My Files view (assuming you are in the same folder) and are denoted with a blue line, making them easier to find and access.
• Virus scanning has been implemented using BitDefender.
• Upload options allow you to choose your default upload type: HTML5, Flash or basic HTML.

Security

Despite being the simplest sharing system, security is always a top priority as we develop new tools. Here are just some of the security improvements we’ve made with the new version of MediaFire:

• Security logs to track all changes to an account in multi-user accounts. This ensures if something disappears or changes the user can determine exactly who and when it changed. It’s available only on Business accounts under the My Account section.
• Access to My Account is protected by SSL security.
• A new Session cookie soft-logs off a user after 90 minutes of inactivity.

Customization

Customization has been something we’ve supported for a while now but with MediaFire “Spock” we’re adding a few more bells and whistles:

• Upload your own custom avatar image or import one from Gravatar.
• Professional and Business account holders can change the header colors of their folder and download pages.
• Professional and Business account holders can add a custom logo to their account which replaces the MediaFire logo in the navigation header.

Professional and Business Accounts

Last but definitely not least, we have changed and updated our MediaPro premium offering with two new types of accounts:

• Business
  • Multi-User Login – Business class users can have multiple users sharing services and files from a single account. Groups or teams can create a business account and then add unlimited number of reads for sub users. Additional seats are much cheaper than for Professional accounts.
  • Business account customers receive a custom subdomain of their choice. When the subdomain is accessed a custom brandable login page is shown. All accesses are done through their subdomain.
  • Automatic Bandwidth Refill – When a Business account customer’s bandwidth gets low, by default they will automatically be charged for more bandwidth in 100GB increments, insuring an undisrupted delivery of services.
  • Starts at 250GBs of download bandwidth.
• Professional
  • All the features you’ve come to love in our pervious MediaPro Gold and Silver accounts.
  • Starts at 100GBs of download bandwidth.

This really is a huge update! As always, we’re constantly improving the service and we love to hear your feedback so please don’t hesitate to drop us a message with your comments and suggestions.

Tom Langridge – Co-Founder, Corporate Communications

It’s that time of year again, parents are ushering kids around department stores picking out pens and pencils, backpacks and lunch boxes. Older students are stocking up on dorm room snacks, ramen noodle packets or moving in to their first apartments away from home. Professors too are getting their class notes together and putting the final touches on their presentations. For many students and professors much of their classwork is being taken into the cloud with their class notes and presentations online as well as in the classroom. Laptops are ubiquitous on college campuses and much of student life is spent behind a screen and keyboard. You can feel it in the air, homework’s arrival is imminent.

MediaFire has always been a great tool for sharing files amongst your friends, family and colleagues, and it’s also a great tool to add to your back-to-school arsenal. Here are some ways you can use MediaFire to enhance your academic career:

1. Share Class Notes

Most students take notes in class and these days a lot of those notes are on a laptop or can easily be scanned into a digital format. Make friends with a few other students in your class and upload each of your class notes into a MediaFire folder and share the links with each other. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for your friend’s notes and always be up to date on the latest notes – even if you miss a day of class. Who knows, maybe the cute brunette who always sits next to you class might even want to join your note sharing circle? You can show her how to create her how to subscribe to your folder RSS feed after class, and then see if she wants to go get some froyo since you both could reeeeaaaally use a break from all this studying. You can thank me later.

2. Project Portability

Tired of lugging around that “desktop replacement” laptop with you to every class and to the library for study hours? Try uploading your class documents to MediaFire and access them anywhere from any computer with a web browser. Simply download what you need to work on, and then upload it again when you’re done working on it. This way you can keep your class assignments, presentations, and video and audio documents all organized on line and accessible from anywhere – even your phone.

3. Use a MediaFire Drop Box to Submit Files to Campus Organizations

Are you a professor with a web page for your class? Maybe you’re a student and just want to compile files from a group assignment in one place, or just want to consolidate high-resolution pictures from your latest club event. You can use MediaFire to create a drop box folder that you can share on your class’s or your organization’s web page or blog and then invite your students and colleagues to upload class assignments or event pictures from multiple cameras into that one folder.

4. Share Large Media Files for Easy Collaboration.

Education isn’t all about creative writing and math, the modern classroom takes advantage of rich media to assist the in the teaching process. Digital cameras and video recording are in just about every student’s pocket in the form of a smart phone and they’re being increasingly used to record class material. Many class projects, regardless of the subject will require the student to incorporate media-rich presentations or projects and especially if you’re a creative media student or professional MediaFire can be the perfect solution for distributing, sharing and collaborating on large media files.

5. Back-Up and Archive Class Notes and Assignments

Hey, it’s happened to all of us – you’ve just finished your final lab report or creative writing assignment and you’re on you way over to the computer lab to print it out when out of nowhere a hipster reading Kafka on his fixie blindsides you sending you flying laptop-bag first into the ground. Fortunately your precious bottom was saved by the one-inch thick marvel of modern technology wedged into the laptop compartment of your backpack, however your semester’s work of 1s and 0s stored on the hard-drive has now been reduced to digital dust…. Okay, maybe this doesn’t happen to all of us, but if it did you’d be ecstatic to remember that all is not lost because you uploaded that assignment to MediaFire just before you left. These things happen, and that’s just one reason to keep your files on MediaFire’s secure and redundant servers. Another great reason is that once you’re done with that class and recovered from the week long binge parting you do to celebrate, you probably won’t ever look back at those documents again but they’ll be sitting there in a disorganized mess of a folder on your hard-drive for the remaining life of your computer. Upload those files and archive them in a MediaFire folder named for the date and subject of the class, and if some day you do need to look up that ancient book report on Lord of the Flies, it will be there – even if your old laptop isn’t.

We have been working with the social media folks at Bob’s Blitz to retrieve a twitter account. They anticipate this being done soon and we appreciate all the help. Show the guys at Bob’s Blitz some love!

Derek

MediaFire now supports Drag and Drop file uploads and Drag and Drop file and image management. Get a taste of what you can do by watching the mini-tour below.

MediaFire uploads are now up to 60% faster then previously. Our new upload server, Big Upload, was released Friday and has shown up to a 60% increase over our previous implementation. This change is currently only for the Advanced uploader, not the basic uploader.

There were a couple of bugs that have been fixed as of Monday afternoon.

Derek