Show HN: SocialFolders, "Dropbox for social"

Sorry - this is so last century. We are heading Into the Cloud, not into "get my social content to my PC" era...

A simple upvote isnt enough. Awesome idea!

Edit: please give us a linux client.

Lovely demo video. Who made that for you?

Promising start. My mum is always on at me to send her the pics of my daughter that I put on Facebook. It would be cool if I could grant her access to my Facebook folder (at the moment I accomplish this through dropbox) but your product removes a couple of steps. Will certainly keep an eye on this one :)

Have you seen http://theopenphotoproject.org/ ?

I'll admit I was initially turned off by the title of the post . It's really "buzz word" heavy -- but I checked out the YouTube video demo anyway and this is a great and much needed tool.

Looks really good. First thought - you need some sort of feedback to let the user know that their files are downloading - I've linked my Facebook account and it's downloading hundreds of photos, but I thought it was broken as it just created a bunch of empty folders. The only way I could confirm that it is working was by checking my used quota. I'm using OSX Lion by the way...

How can you compare it to Locker [1] ?

[1] https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker

I like it.

It did however take me till the last 30 seconds of the video to actually get how this would be useful to me.

Need to play with it to get you more feedback.

Great project! I remember seeing the possibilities of something along these lines, when I browsed the recipes of ifttt that crawled your social feeds for photos by yourself and others and saved them in your Dropbox folder. If this folder were shareable, it would create a different social network all by itself! And better yet, I wouldn't have to sign up for silly social networks and Facebook in order to get access to that data.

I don't know if this is disruptive, but I hope this will help break the data lock-ins networks like Facebook and Twitter photo services are using to retain and attract users. (And what happens if one of the sites go belly-up with all your data?)

If I could make one suggestions, the site as it currently is looks like one for a generic software download. You should, eventually, try to make it look more friendly and inviting as if to say that this is a social ecosystem of sorts.

Best of luck! If you're in SF or NYC, you probably won't need it with all the people who'll throw themselves at you over a great idea like this. :)

Just a heads up, if you click on "Getting Started" at the bottom it sends you to the "getting-started-mac" page, and the download is for mac. If I click directly on "download" it knows I'm on windows, but through the getting started vector it serves me the wrong link.

Otherwise, looks amazing, gonna give it a whirl after work.

1) Glad you're charging because it makes me feel like you'll be around.

2) I'm trying to sync 1 file and it's taking over 20 minutes (so far)

3) It'd be nice to allow one-way sync. I don't want to flood my MB Air's tiny drive with every photo I sent to Flickr, but I would want to upload all of my Air's photos.

This is one of those ideas that you see and go 'wasn't this done already?' But in fact it wasn't!

Love the idea and the intro. Instant User!

Tons of questions about the syncing features with different services etc.

This looks like a great frontend for FUSE (or MacFUSE by Google, http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). I think you guys nailed the user experience because FUSE can be really difficult to setup for n00bs.

Great idea, however If I want to share a set of photos on multiple services, I have to waste a lot of space !? will symlink works?

If I modify a file locally, does that get mirrored elsewhere?

Also, I assume that such modifications aren't propagated to the other copies?

I am the only one that gets a time-out when trying to download the app?

Clickable links: screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ, website: http://socialfolders.me

I'm definitely not your client base as the few things I do put on social profiles all come from my hard drive anyway, so I have no need to back up or export them.

That said, this service looks very slick and kmfrk makes a great point about using it to liberate your photos and such and make them available to people that don't have accounts. For example, links to facebook photos are useless for me since I don't have an account there, but if the people uploading their photos there could also have them mirrored to SocialFolders or even another network where I either have an account or don't need an account to view them, that would be sweet. If they could have that happen without doing anything extra on their own (after installing the software, of course), that would be pretty amazing!

This is awesome! Thanks for providing this service - there are loads of nice pictures on Facebook that I've been meaning to make a backup of for ages, now there's a tool that lets me do that without any fuss.

Export/Backup for your Social Networks - great idea.

Can I get more than just photos (files)? Can I save my data or will that get you banned from a few of the providers you integrate with!

I use Backupify for this 'anti-Cloud' type service - it backs up my Gmail. Since I use more than one PC, I'd like to see this do similar to Dropbox - sync local, in the Cloud, and be accessible through clients on any device. I suppose I could do that by putting the SocialFolders into Dropbox - but I'm not sure I want to pay on the double then.

If I have the same 100MB file set on multiple social sites through SocialFolders, does that mean I have the set on my local hard drive multiple times as well?

Nice idea and beautifully implemented, you just gained a new user. The "moving between services" is the real killer feature, imo.

Great idea and beautiful execution. I just copy/pasted a few photos from Instagram to Facebook. I will definitely use this.

Very nice idea and so far the service looks pretty good. Congratulations :) I did find it a little hard to find the different pricing levels/what I get for them. I think having a page dedicated to the different account types (free, premium, etc) linked off the main menu would be good.

So what happens when I copy my SocialFolder into my Dropbox folder? Does the universe implode? :D

This is a really nice idea, well done! I'm going to try this out for a few days but I fully expect to but an annual premium account. I'd quite like it if i could turn off the menubar icon in OS X though.

The taskbar menu shows how much I've used of my quota, but what would be very useful would be the dropbox-esque bit of info that tells me how much of it has actually sync'd.

This has serious legs, martin. Well done :) A similar idea has been in my "would-be-nice" list for eons, but its amazing to see it actually work.

Wishing you great success! Happy hacking !

Great idea. http://socialfolders.me/download-pc/ screenshots looks crappy.

The "remember me" option on the login doesn't seem to work. Not a big deal, but just pointing it out :-)

Sweet video! I would suggest adding a clickable link on your youtube video description.

great idea, so great that i'm helping to spread on facebook... Still has field to find a way to keep just one file to all social networks, but maybe it will make the end user confused...

I can find so much use from this. Great job!

It's nice, but it doesn't quite "mirror all the content I have" because it doesn't transfer comments. I claim ownership of all comments left by me, and by others, on my content. When a social network deletes a picture of mine, all the comments are lost, as well. This breaks the conversation, and cannot be fixed by simply re-uploading the original content. I understand that you cannot transfer comments from one social network to another, but the basic problem remains. Solve that, and you've got a real winner.