Minus is primarily a web application, with a spiffy HTML5 drag-and-drop uploader. Just drop a file onto the page, copy the link and share. Couldn’t be simpler.

There are applications for OS X, Windows and Linux (as well as mobile phones and tablets) that allow you to upload files without loading up the website. The desktop apps work by allowing you to drop a file onto an icon.

Minus is free for now, but they have some limits in place. Files can be no larger than 200MB each, but there is no limit to the number you can upload. If you upload a lot of small files, Minus could certainly be a more attractive option than CloudApp, which only allows 10 uploads per day for free accounts.

If you’re looking for a way to quickly share files with people, Minus is worth a look. Even if you don’t need it very often, it’s a great tool to keep in your arsenal.

Enter TestFlight.

I’m not sure how it does it, but TestFlight takes the pain out of iOS beta distribution. You just build an app, upload it, enter some email addresses, and TestFlight magically takes care of the rest.

When a beta tester gets an email from TestFlight, they register their device by logging into the TestFlight website on their iOS device. It installs a provisioning profile over the air, and lets them access your uploaded application builds in the same way.

However it does its magic, TestFlight is an indispensable tool for developers.

Microsoft says that they plan to subsidize Last.fm for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox so their users will not have to pay the subscription.

This change will go into effect on February 15.

Free Last.fm service on mobile devices turning into subscriber-only feature [Ars Technica]

Google Storage for Developers will cost $0.17 per gigabyte per month for storage, plus transfer fees. It seems slightly more expensive for the month-to-month fee, but the bandwidth charges might be cheaper. For the duration of the preview Google is offering “100 gigabytes of storage and 300 gigabytes of bandwidth per month” at no cost.

It’s also worth noting that Google offers App Engine, a cost-efficient cloud hosting solution for Python/Rails/Java applications. Amazon has a similar service as part of their impressive AWS suite. With either provider, Google or Amazon, you could cheaply run a large web application more efficiently than if you were having to manually deploy physical servers. Reddit awhile ago switched from running their own servers to using AWS and has had nothing but good things to say about it.

It’s nice to see some more competition in this area. Hopefully it will lead to lower prices.

This video demonstrates it well:

It takes a little time to get used to, but it actually does seem to be quicker. There isn’t a noticeable lag while results load, even on a 1mbps DSL line. The feature does disable itself on slower connections, though.

Google Instant: It Searches Before You Type [TechCrunch]

Starting today (Wednesday, Aug. 11th), all new customers will be required to select a plan upon signing-up — including choosing the free option if desired.

The following week, current HootSuite users will be asked to choose a package with the help of a migration wizard to help you choose the best plan.

For all customers (aside from Enterprise-class accounts), we’ll include a 30-day free trial. This period will allow you to experiment and discover which plan best fits your needs. Again, we’ll continue to offer a free plan for those of you who don’t require advanced options at this time.

The paid plans start at $4.99/month and quickly get pricey. I think their tier structure could have used some more work, such as allowing more collaborators and for cheaper plans, but maybe that’s just me…

Your files are stored on Amazon S3, mirrored across multiple servers and facilities, so it’s very unlikely that you will have any data loss issues.

One interesting part of the application is its extensibility. You can install a number of “Raindrop” plugins that allow the app to perform different actions when you press the universal CloudApp keyboard shortcut. Perhaps you’re in iTunes? Pressing the key combination will upload the selected songs. Photoshop? The current canvas will be uploaded. Firefox, Safari, or Chrome? A short URL for the current web page will be generated.

The service only works on Mac OS X for now, but there is a REST API, so it’s entirely possible for someone to write a Windows or Linux client.

CloudApp is in public beta, and the developers have not implemented any visible means of monetization. My guess is that it will remain free, but I do wonder how they intend to sustain their service. Ads on the web page? Premium plans?

Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

Speaking as someone who operates several websites: what? Does this mean tinfoil hat-wearing users will be able to opt-out of whatever habit-tracking information Google may collect for their own purposes, or does this mean they will be releasing a product that cripples their popular website statistics package?

Anyone running a website needs to know how much traffic they get, what the most common screen resolutions used are, what browsers visitors primarily use to access the site, and who’s linking in. Without that basic information, that poses absolutely no privacy threat, you’re flying blind. I assume that Google wouldn’t be stupid enough to build and promote a browser extension that could render their own statistics service useless?

I have no problem with people being able to opt-out of any questionable behavior tracking (i.e. following users from site to site) that Google may be doing behind the scenes, but I don’t want Google Analytics to become absolutely useless. I may be overreacting, but the Google bloggers certainly could have been more clear.

I imagine it would be nice to get one of their larger plans and automagically sync all of your files between a desktop and a laptop, but not all of us are willing to pay for that luxury.

Now if you have a few assorted folders that you want to keep synced with Dropbox, what’s an easy way to do so without physically moving them into your main Dropbox folder? You can use the magic of symbolic links. (A magic that only exists on Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix…)

Open a command line and type the following two commands, changing the paths to whatever is relevant in your situation:

cd /Users/Matt/Dropbox
ln -s /Users/Matt/path/to/my/files The_New_Folder_Name

Now if you go back to your Dropbox folder, you should see a new directory called “The_New_Folder_Name” that, when clicked, should bounce you right over to the original folder. Dropbox will see this “shortcut” link as the real deal and back the files up to the cloud.

What’s Apple going to do with their acquisition? It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to guess that.

Imagine iTunes, but with the features of Lala built in.

Another idea is that we might be seeing a browser-based version of iTunes in the future, as part of the “merge Lala into iTunes” idea. This would make is possible to listen to, and purchase, music on a computer where you can’t install iTunes.

Apple isn’t the type of company to split themselves over more than one brand, and I can’t see them shutting down Lala, so it just seems inevitable that the two services will eventually be consolidated.