A few points that might interest yall:
1. We won't publish to facebook or twitter without your explicit permission.
2. We ask for information about your facebook profile because it will make Dropbox better. It's mainly about learning about our users without annoying surveys. We won't mandate facebook connect on signup so this is likely going to be the main path in the near term for people to facebook connect. Facebook auth also makes it really easy to post to facebook when you want to; the user experience is better.
3. Yes, runjake is right. Please do subscribe if you love Dropbox. I work here, so I set my capacity to 5TB and symlink everything important on my system (Desktop, Documents, etc) to Dropbox. The experience of coming to a home computer and having the stuff I was working on just appear is nothing less than magical. This is enabled by having more than a few gigs of storage.
4. If you want terabytes of storage, come work here. It is the best tech company in the valley: http://www.dropbox.com/jobs
Ask me anything.
Today, my Aperture library is 109GB, because I work with archival scans from medium format film.
TL;DR: 100GB is a very small limit. How can I pay you more?
Thanks for the heads-up that you won't publish anything to FB/Twitter without explicit permission as that's exactly what I came to the comments to find out. I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of your users read hackernews though, so it'd be nice if you added a tiny "why are we asking you to link up" and/or "what will happen if I link up" blurbs explaining that you're not going to instantly make us tweet how awesome Dropbox is (which I would do anyway, but I absolutely hate services that auto-post after connecting).
Edit: This would really only be useful for powerusers unless you gave it a nice front-end interface, but would you consider possibly creating something similar to a .gitignore config for your Dropbox? I constantly get random junk files based on OS and editor that end up in my Dropbox folders that I'd love for the central service to just ignore when syncing (like Thumbs, DS_Store, vim swp, random editors throwing backups ending in ~, etc).
Here's a question: I'm very inclined to pay for Dropbox, but I don't actually need 50 GB - I use 1% of that now. On the other hand, I would absolutely pay the same amount for 10 GB for 5 years. It would give me the warm fuzzy feeling of giving back and I would feel safer with the service. Have you ever discussed this model? Any plans to implement it?
5TB sounds good, but how long does that take to sync? I've got about 20GB in mine now I think and syncing it to a new computer seems like it would take several days (I get the "grab a snickers" message). I usually start of a new machine my rsyncing stuff over so not the end of the world, but it would be useful to download stuff at a speed resembling what my, not that great, connection can handle.
Dropbox rules by the way, it's changed how I use my computers :)
As far as what you can do today with facebook, if you download the beta builds from the forums you can get access to a new sharing model. You can publish links of files to facebook & twitter. This page will change a lot when we launch this properly, but you can see what i mean: https://www.dropbox.com/s/owdlzphfhiw2ao4/koalabox.PNG
Facebook and twitter are great for sharing, so it makes sense for Dropbox to leverage them when people want to share files. Photos is a good example application where sharing often means pushing to a social network.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of work to do on different pricing plans.
>All transmission of file data and metadata occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL).
>All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256).
And yet I hear people here saying that Dropbox is "missing encryption." What's the real story? Are there more technical details on your encryption posted somewhere on your site?
I'd really like to know, as I actually have a good deal of semi-sensitive information stored in my account right now--a decision I made based on the wording I copied in above and on my trust in the Dropbox folks so far.
They do not mean that Dropbox is insecure. Dropbox is secure.
The problem with end to end is that it makes sharing or public files unfeasible, and those are important parts of Dropbox.
Are their plans to make this more intuitive, given this is how you yourself find dropbox most useful?
Congratulations on all the successes. You guys are doing something way cool. One question - when did you know Dropbox was a winner? And if the answer is "right away," then when did you really know Dropbox was a winner?
Any specific events stand out to you?
The Cloud™ is one of those mega trends, and Dropbox is right in the middle of it.
Regarding your "voting" system so users can "decide what we work on next", why is it that there are things with tens of thousands of votes from a year ago not "being worked on" (or declined), yet "use application indicator in Ubuntu" with three hundred votes is being worked on?
What's the point of a voting system if you don't address the most voted items first?
Free storage for following dropbox on twitter has 16 votes.
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2235/free-storage-space-for-...
Any plans along those lines?
Also keep up the good work!
thanks!
Also, it isn't clear at all from this post that the page isn't done. There are important but missing steps, for example. Also, there is no link currently from the normal web experience to /free.
Such a write-up would be useful if only for us though. Writing codifies coherent thinking.
Apply to something that looks good, but explain you're looking for an internship. Do the challenge problems to get noticed.
They're asking for read/write permission, which makes me wonder if it's going to post every time I change a file or something. No thanks.
Presumably I could just delete their access now I’ve got my free space but I haven’t tried that.
Edit: "I love Dropbox because it gives me free space even when I connect fake twitter and facebook accounts. :)"
1.) Sign up for a $9 50GB membership.
2.) Go through their wizard to set up a recurring $9 Paypal payment.
3.) There is no step 3.
Time spent: 3 minutes
Karma spent: You support a great company that doesn't screw you over.
Totally worth it for their checkout process though, the way it automatically switched to "Visa" is a card starts with a 4 is awesome.
This allows you to use your Dropbox for personal and work, and only sync your work stuff to work machines and vice versa.
There's some great file versioning stuff in there as well.
And to think of all the time and wasted energy we spent early on trying to get user feedback. Incentives are a wonderful thing!
Instead, I'm currently using Wuala which encrypts the data diretly on the client. An alternative to Wuala seems to be SpiderOak, which also features client side encryption (but I didn't try this one yet).
I'm up to 4.9GB of free space, but I'm only using 7.6%, so I'm well under 2GB. And I would venture to guess that I'musing more space than the average free user.
So their cost isn't even the pretty-low cost of (cost to store 128MB * the number of people who do the task). It's the tiny cost of (cost to store 128MB * the number of people who do the task * percentage of those people that actually use the space).
That's also the reason why uploads are so fast. If a file is already on the server it isn't uploaded again.
A little far fetched maybe, but I'm sure there's a way to exploit something somewhere using that....
On Windows, Dropbox shows up as "My Documents/My Dropbox". When really "My Documents" should be the dropbox.
One of the things I love about Dropbox is that they've always seemed to be very straight forward and above board. They feel trustable.
Why? Please explain!
Everything we asked for has a hypothetical future purpose or a present value as an implicit user survey. We could, for example, make the photos upload experience to facebook much better. That requires posting photos and also reading photos to understand how much our users might care about the feature.
We could just ask for that access later, but this is easier. Users are getting something in exchange, so for most I'd bet it is a fair trade: capacity boost for data.
Basically they offer a number of options to get some extra free space for their service. Giving them some feedback, linking your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts, and posting about why you “love Dropbox” on your Twitter / Facebook account once authorised.
I don’t suppose I would normally have posted to my Facebook wall about Dropbox, nor my Twitter account, but now I have.
Presumably the cost to Dropbox is quite minimal (768MB extra free space in total). It’s made me think about ways in which we could offer similar incentives at $dayjob.
Comparing these two pages is really interesting in the different prompts to post and the different results. We'll integrate the two pages more deeply soon.
The "Access my data any time" permission gives the application a long-lasting (nearly indefinite) "access token" that the application can store and user to interact with your Facebook account at a later time.
So it seemed really strange to me that I had to connect my twitter account before I could follow @dropbox, and the error message you get when you click on the follow one before the auth one is not very descriptive.
Otherwise, really cool offer, thanks guys.
1. I trust that they're not doing anything scummy or underhanded. My life's on Dropbox, and they're not going to do anything to reduce that level of trust.
2. If I ended up accidentally Tweeting that I love Dropbox, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
This said, the messaging was very clear, and everything behaved as expected. Great work as usual, guys.
Sidenote to Dropbox: Buy a SSL certificate that supports dropbox.com without the www.
Increase the incentive ;p
I stopped short of clicking the "report spam" button, but it cost you some amount of goodwill, so you lose either way. I will be a lot less likely now to genuinely recommend your app to my friends.
Keep up the good work Dropbox, you ROCK!!
PS: Who could have thought that so much innovation could happen with something so seemingly small (an "online disk drive")
I would like to sync via my home server, not cloud.
