Monday, April 07, 2008

Scribd does not work on Ubuntu so hurt my whole online experience

I am such a big fan of scribd and that's why I am so disappointed that  I cannot upload file after I switch from Windows Vista to Ubuntu Linux as my desktop environment.

I love scribd because it is a key part of my "smooth online experience of documentation". For editable document, I use Zoho writer alll the time. For any file comes in as an email attachment, I use Google Docs because Gmail is my default web email (byebye hotmail,yahoo mail! and sina mail). For uneditable files, I upload important/personal files to the free account ofBox.net (1G for free), I upload really old achieves to Xdrive.com, then I upload files in public domain to scribd.com so that I dont need to store any file in my local drive. In a way, I think I am already in the "always-on" mode describd by Mark Kvamme@Sequoia Capital.
Check his podcast interview below:






















Here is a quick summary of Kevin's talk:

- Vertical Search is interesting
- Broad Band adoption (>500kps) in the States is a key trend to watch since it will bring a always-on way to use Internet and it may dramatically change the online world
- Adoption of new media, video/picture etc, is still growing and sharing is key
- Content creation is expensive and will hit newspaper/magazine badly. Local newspaper will die first

Kevin is a sharp guy so you may want to listen to other talk he had given at PodTech here.



So you see how critical scribd is being part of my online/offline seamless experience. So scribd guys, please...

I am runnign Ubuntu 7.10, Firefox 2.0.0.13 and Flash 9. Scribd not only does not allow me to upload file (forever 0% completed) but also crash my Opera browser as well...

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5 comments:

snowmaker said...

Oh no! Unfortunately, there do seem to be some issues with that Flash uploader on linux. It is actually a bug in linux Flash that they apparently still haven't fixed.

We'll be rolling out a Java-based uploader (Aurigma, like Facebook uses) as an alternative that has better compatibility.

Regards,
Jared


--
Jared Friedman
CTO, Scribd

li said...

Thanks for your comment, Jared. What a charm to use scribd on Firefox/windows before! But hey, I am not going to roll back to windows. waiting for your java version then. BTW, why not a simple HTML uploader?

Manoj Ranaweera said...

Have you tried www.edocr.com? Not sure whether ours work in your environment. But appreciate any feedback you may have. I appreciate it makes sense to use one platform - but there are others who upload to both Scribd and edocr. It depends entirely on what your requirements are. Very happy to listen to:

Best regards
Manoj (edocr - CEO)

li said...

Manoj,


Would love to give edocr a try and will post my experience here later.

Li

Anonymous said...

Fixing scribd in Ubuntu 9.04:

1. Go to Adobe's site and install latest version of flash player (.deb for Ubuntu) using Ubuntu's default package installer.

2. Using System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager, Remove the installed plugin swfdec-mozilla

3. Restart Firefox - scribd now works