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This isn't a threat to dropbox becaue (as I read it) you have to set up your own server, or maybe hook up on a friends server. While this is certainly a great f
by mixmax 16y ago
This isn't a threat to dropbox becaue (as I read it) you have to set up your own server, or maybe hook up on a friends server. While this is certainly a great feature that a lot of people will value, the beauty of dropbox is that it just works. Without you having to install a server.
I see the following obstacles with installing a server for sparkleshare:
1) You need a server. This might be obvious, but normal people don't have one.
2) You need to monitor your server. If the architecture is anything like dropbox it doesn't need to have 100% uptime since synchronizing will just be delayed a bit, but you still need to check in every now and then to make sure everything is OK.
3) Installing a server has never been easy. There is always some sort of problem with port forwarding, IP adresses, proxies, etc. unless you have a server somewhere in the cloud which most people don't. Normal people are barely aware of what a server is. See point 1.
4) Your backups are still your worry. What makes dropbox great is that I know that if they lose my data they have a serious business problem - they'll be held accountable. I'll write rants on my blog and everyone on HN will read it. They'll go through great lengths to prevent this. Besides their knowledge of backup procedures, RAID disks, redundancy and what have you is far far greater than mine. (At least I hope so :-)) If I host my files on my own server I'm the one that's accountable.
I see this as a great service for companies that have some IT staff and aren't comfortable having all their company files hosted by another company, and hackers that prefer their own server. But it's not a threat to dropbox, which is getting popular among non-techies. My mom even has dropbox installed.
- mattmaroon 16y agoIt depends what they define as a "server". If you have to set up a Linux box somewhere with decent upstream, then yeah, I'm not spending any time on that. And I'm the sort of person who could do it. However for what I use Dropbox for, I'd be perfectly fine if the "server" was just an old Windows box running out of my basement. If there's nothing more onerous than a port-forward it might be useful. But either way I doubt the guys at Dropbox have anything to worry about. To hurt them this doesn't have to appeal to the average Dropbox customer. It only has to appeal to the average paying Dropbox customer. There's a big difference there, but probably not big enough to matter.
- Splines 16y agoSome thoughts: IMO, the biggest challenge of making this server-less is NAT traversal. Discovery is also a problem if this becomes an open standard. Setting up an open SparkleShare server that can bridge traffic between two NAT'ed clients might be able to solve the problem. It'd be a plus if there was a way to take the bridging server out of the loop once data transfer starts (I don't know if that's technically possible though). The same SparkleShare server could be a default discovery server for new users, so they get a "it just works" experience (e.g., run the setup on two machines, with the same login credentials they find each other through the discovery server). Designed correctly, the server-less and the hosted scenario should function the same - in a hosted scenario you just happen to always have one client online.
- neilc 16y agoIf Sparkleshare develops some momentum, you could easily see third-parties compete to offer Sparkleshare storage as a service, in a similar manner to how Dropbox works today.
- mixmax 16y agoYou could. But you'd only introduce more variables for the enduser. All of a sudden you'd have to decide which third-party service to sign up for, and many of them might just be a guy in a basement running the service to pay for college tuition. You'd have to check up on this before you know for sure. The complete setup procedure for dropbox is as follows: 1) Navigate to dropbox.com 2) click download 3) doubleclick the file when you're done downloading This is very hard to compete with in terms of ease of use. No strange choices to make, no weird preferences to fill out, no problems. It just works.
- neilc 16y agoSure, but dropbox themselves aren't exactly a blue chip corporation with a long-established reputation. There's no need for additional third-party configuration, either: $X.com could easily host a custom build of SparkleShare configured for their site. Hence, the straightforward installation process you describe could work equally well with s/dropbox/$foo/g.
- neurotech1 16y agoIt is a Y Combinator backed company, and has some reputation.
- pyre 16y ago> All of a sudden you'd have to decide which third-party service to sign up for, and many of them might just be a guy in a basement running the service to pay for college tuition. You'd have to check up on this before you know for sure. Isn't this the same for everything? What you seem to be advocating is that we centralize everything so that no one has to think or research when making purchases. > This is very hard to compete with in terms of ease of use. No strange choices to make, no weird preferences to fill out, no problems. It just works. But you have to decide to use DropBox in the first place. The crux of your argument seems to be that DropBox is easy because they are the only choice. Using that logic, one could make the case that the entire Internet should run off of a single email provider with branded client software.
- j23tom 16y agopeople could create their servers on box like this one: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.aspx#component http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...
- jamesbritt 16y agoI'll wait until JumpBox offers this and toss it up on EC2.
- evancaine 16y agoBeing open source, I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone writes a plugin/fork that works with Amazon S3. The user would then only need to sign up for an S3 account and that largely removes all four of the roadblocks you mention.