Bre recently posted this on the MakerBot blog, and it seems appropriate to repost here:

Here at MakerBot, we make open source hardware and we freely share digital designs for our products on Thingiverse.com. As a business, we strive to be a model for the bold companies of the 21st century that embrace sharing. You can download the design files for the things we sell on Thingiverse.com.

We created Thingiverse to be the digital design sharing utopia of our dreams. Thingiverse.com integrates with open licenses that encourages Thingiverse users to let others copy and change their work so that others can stand on their shoulders and create the products of tomorrow and the solutions for the next generation. Every day I look on Thingiverse and say “Wow!” when I see the new things that have been shared. People who upload designs to Thingiverse are my heroes.

Things, and digital designs for things, are very different than other types of media. Copyright doesn’t work the same way on things as it does with music, movies, and books. If you’re into exploring the intellectual property landscape of things, you need to read “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up” by Michael Weinberg.

The Pirate Bay announcement of a new category for digital designs is interesting because it’s another place where people can share digital designs for real things. As a technology, torrents are particularly great for super mega giant files because they distribute the downloading load and I’m curious to see what kinds of things will begin to show up in that category. Because The Pirate Bay takes a bold, no-holds-barred approach to sharing, I’m sure there will be controversies as companies and people who long for the proprietary days of the 20th century come to terms with the raw power of contemporary sharing technology. Cue squeaking of the world’s tiniest violin.

In the contemporary age of sharing, those who share will be the leaders of tomorrow. The sharers will be the ones who will emerge in the 21st century as winners in the rapidly changing innovative landscape. I’ve consistently advised individuals and companies to push their comfort level and share more. If you have a company that feels threatened by the idea of someone sharing digital designs for your products, I suggest you join the sharing community and share those design files yourself on Thingiverse.com.

Thingiverse has just been re-launched and is even more awesome! Thingiverse is a powerful sharing platform for digital designs where all the content is free and the future is bright.

Back before Thingiverse.com, people were able to download music, movies, and even books, but there was no place to share and download things. Then Thingiverse, a universe of things, was created in 2008 and digital design has never been the same.

Thingiverse users share their digital designs for real things and become superstars to the other users on Thingiverse. Every day, Thingiverse has new things community members have shared. It’s truly amazing. There are thousands of things on Thingiverse, and millions of people visit the site to be inspired by the creativity of Thingiverse users.

And today, there’s a new and improved Thingiverse!

• It’s easier than ever to share your digital designs and be a superstar
• A new front page giving top billing to the latest featured Thing
• A new look and better organization for Thing pages and User profiles
• Simplified Thing editing – it’s all in one place
• Improved search and navigation make it easier to find what you’re looking for
• On the backend, we’ve improved the architecture so everything works smoother.
• Refined features for attribution and derivatives
• A thing can now have multiple ancestors – bring on the mashups!
• “I Made a Derivative” button makes it clearer what to do when you make a derivative of another Thing
• Post those beautiful photos of your prints with the “I Made One!” button
• The backend of the site has improved to make sharing easier.

Check out the new Thingiverse now! Don’t let your creativite work suffocate with loneliness on your hardrive. Get your designs off your computer and up on Thingiverse. Share your designs today!

One feature request that we commonly see at the Thingiverse help desk is to build an improved search engine into Thingiverse. Our first search feature was powered by Google and – while this was easy to implement, and could turn up all kinds of content on Thingiverse – it was very clunky to use.

Our new and improved search will help you find any Thing on Thingiverse! We take your search terms and scour the names, descriptions, instructions, tags, and even creator names for every Thing, and serve up the Things that best match.

Looking for “upgrades“? Or maybe you only want “Thing-O-Matic upgrades“? Our search is designed to help you narrow in on the thing you want, fast.

We’re pretty excited about this new feature, so please give it a try!

By popular demand, Thingiverse now has a Thing Publishing Checklist!

We want each thing on Thingiverse to be as useful as possible for the community, so we’ve added the following checklist to ensure that each new Thing, at minimum:

• Has a name (“Untitled” doesn’t count!)
• Has a description
• Has at least one file which is not an image

This is a small change, but we hope it will help cut down on the number of Things that are accidentally published before they are complete.

Tony Buser’s Thingiview.js is an in-browser 3D file viewer powered by WebGL.  If you have a WebGL-enabled browser, you can view 3D files in your browser almost as fast as viewing them with a desktop application.

Now, Thingiview.js is available on Thingiverse! Just look for the little  cube icon next to the thumbnails for any STL file.  For example:

As a bonus, and as shown above, you can embed Thingiviews into your own pages! Each Thingiview page has an “Embed This Thing” button, which gives you the HTML to copy-and-paste into your site. You can even customize the colors!

If your current web browser doesn’t support WebGL, you might want to try the latest Google Chrome, which has WebGL support built in, or check out the latest Firefox and Safari betas.

The ability to preview 3D files in-browser has been on our wishlist for a while so it is great to be able to get this feature into the hands of the citizens of Thingiverse!

Please keep in mind that Thingiview is an experimental feature. If you run into any files that don’t work, please let us know!

The Popular Things section of Thingiverse has been a great showcase of some of the most popular Things ever posted to the site.

Unfortunately, this didn’t really reflect what the citizens of Thingiverse like right now. As a few things became really popular, they took over the top spots and stayed there.

We want popular things to showcase what the community currently thinks is the best stuff coming out of Thingiverse, so we’ve tweaked it to only take into account the last 30 days worth of “Likes” and other information.

Check it out! You’re bound to find something awesome in there.

The Creative Commons announced the Open Attribute project yesterday:

Open Attribute, “a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work,” launched today with browser add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The add-ons “query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.”

…

Open Attribute uses CC REL metadata found in the pages to generate the attribution metadata. You might remember that we developed a guide with real examples to make CC REL metadata much easier to implement: CC REL by Example contains example HTML pages, as well as explanations and links to more information. If you’re curious to see how Open Attribute pulls the metadata, the guide includes a specific section on Attributing Reuses.

As you can see from the image above, Thingiverse already includes license information on the page for each Thing. That means that these add-ons already work for any Creative Commons licensed Things on Thingiverse!

We look forward to seeing more cool stuff from the Open Attribute project.

They say that sharing is caring. If that is the case, then I believe that auto-sharing is auto-caring!

Thingiverse can now automatically post to Twitter whenever you upload a new Thing, make a copy of somebody else’s Thing, or whenever one of your Things is featured! We’ll also show your Twitter username on your profile if you like.

Getting everything set up is easy! Just visit your profile, click on the “edit my profile” link, and look for the new Twitter section. Clicking the “Sign-in with Twitter” button will run you through the process to authorize Thingiverse to tweet on your behalf. Once you’ve done it, you’ll see something like this:

For the curious, the automated tweets look something like:

@schmarty: I made a Thing on Thingiverse! http://thingiverse.com/thing:1046 #thingalert

Enjoy, and be on the lookout for new features like this in the future! If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line.

What is Flattr?

What’s that? You say you already know everything there is to know about the awesome European social micro-payment service, Flattr? How amazingly in-the-know you are!

Well, for the rest of us, Flattr is a flat-rate flattering system that lets you give (and receive!) cash money for things that you like on the web.

And now Thingiverse works with Flattr!

How it Works

First, you’ll need to sign up with Flattr, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve signed up and added some money to your account, you can start Flattring your favorite things, designers, and even Thingiverse itself!

But you said “receive”!

Indeed I did! Receiving Flattr’s on your things is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Copy your Flattr User ID from your Flattr settings page.
2. Go to your Thingiverse Profile and click “Edit my Profile”.
3. Paste your Flattr User ID in to the Flattr section and save.

Once we know your Flattr ID, Thingiverse will automatically put Flattr buttons on your profile and on every thing you upload! Awesome!

Flattr works on a give-to-receive philosophy, so get out there and start Flattring! Check their website for more info about how Flattr works.

Thingiverse just experienced what we in the business call a “catastrophic hardware failure” – a hard drive decided to up and die, taking everything down with it.

Thankfully, Zach and I were able to tag team this problem and get everything migrated to another (better!) server, and restored from backups in about half an hour.  Yeah!

Unfortunately, the latest full backup we had was from this morning, so it looks like we lost data on about 5 things.  We have some partial backups of those and will try to restore what we can of them tomorrow.  In the meantime, if you uploaded a new Thing to Thingiverse today, please go ahead and upload them again.

In the interests of full disclosure, here are the Things we lost:

• Herringbone Geared Extruder Driver by rhys-jones
• Flessenschraper timschmidt
• Printed Quadrocopter by Zaggo
• Little Rocketship by mojomonkey
• C120 Webcam Security Mounts by pandelume

Thanks for bearing with us while we deal with this issue, and special thanks to the folks that dropped us a note to let us know that things were messed up! Our new server should be nicely RAID-enabled, so losing a disk doesn’t mean losing data!