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Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)
- daniel_iversen 16y agoA good test of a product is how many people are willing to give you a positive review to their friends/family/colleagutes/etc 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")
- eps 16y agoIs this a marketing trick of some sort? I'm getting a login form and that's it.
- davecardwell 16y agoAh, sorry—that’s my fault. I didn’t check if you could access the page when not logged in. 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.
- jrnkntl 16y agoAuthorized, followed @dropbox, told them why I loved it, posted about it & de-authorized Twitter, easiest 512mb I made under 30 seconds. Sidenote to Dropbox: Buy a SSL certificate that supports dropbox.com without the www.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- morisy 16y agoTell us why you love Dropbox = 128 MB. And to think of all the time and wasted energy we spent early on trying to get user feedback. Incentives are a wonderful thing!
- zavulon 16y agoNot sure how accurate this feedback is though
- pavs 16y agoNot much of a feedback if you are asked why you love dropbox. I don't know why someone would _not_ love dropbox...
- fragmede 16y agoClosed source binary blob needed for client. Meaning it doesn't work on PPC/MIPS/ARM computers. (Not important to most, but it's a valid technical reason why not.)
- spiffworks 16y agoI was just thinking about this. This is the only reason that would keep me from switching to an ARM smartbook if a good one ever came out.
- akent 16y agoI'm sure if ARM based netbooks ever became actually popular Dropbox would take the time to compile an ARM version of the client.
- spiffworks 16y agoIts a chicken and egg problem, really. Besides, I would appreciate the ability to wrangle my own dropbox client. From their api, it seems that each app which hooks into their API must have a secret key, so I wonder if an open-source client can be distributed minus the key.
- akent 16y agoChicken and egg? You think the only thing holding back the popularity of ARM based netbooks is that there's no Dropbox client for ARM yet? ;)
- davecardwell 16y agoI thought this was a clever way of incentivising people to authorise Dropbox to access their Facebook and Twitter accounts. 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.
- ivankirigin 16y agoMany people post to facebook & twitter from here: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals https://www.dropbox.com/referrals 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.
- stevelosh 16y agoSo what does "Connect your Twitter account to Dropbox" actually mean? 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.
- zavulon 16y agoYeah, I'm sorry but I'm not clicking "Connect your Twitter account" without telling me EXACTLY what will happen afterwards.
- fharper1961 16y agoSame here!
- user24 16y agoso you're happy to share your personal files with dropbox, but not your twitter account? Odd priorities. Not saying they're wrong priorities, but just not what I'd expect.
- sesqu 16y agoIt's a lot harder to automate abuse of a random person's semistructured data without metadata than it is to automate abuse of a random person's twitter account. Sure, it's also more lucrative, but I wouldn't worry about it for a couple more years.
- latortuga 16y agoIt's also quite a lot easier to disallow them from using your twitter account.
- user24 16y agoI don't really know what you mean. You're right. But I don't see how that's relevant. My point was that people have a choice "I trust dropbox not to abuse my personal files" and they draw the line at their twitter account?!? This I find odd. I don't see how your comment makes it less odd.
- runjake 16y agoHere's a more simple task I was able to perform for 50GB of space: 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.
- citricsquid 16y agoI don't even use Dropbox, but you made me feel bad because I have an account and used the free space a few years ago, so now I'm pro. Damn you! Totally worth it for their checkout process though, the way it automatically switched to "Visa" is a card starts with a 4 is awesome.
- runjake 16y agoBe sure to check out the "selective sync" folder functionality in their betas (which are pretty stable). Selective sync allows you to specify what folders you do and don't want synced on a machine by machine basis. 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.
- sliverstorm 16y agoVery true. I only wish they had some smaller price steps; I can't commit to $10/mo. I'd love to give them money if I could buy, say, 25GB for $5 or 10 for $2.50
- phjohnst 16y agoI totally agree. I'm sure that it would screw with their pricing, but I really just dont need 50GB, and can get by with the 3GB that I have now. Sure I'd like a little more (and frankly, would happily pay $5/mo for what I have now), but I just dont have enough stuff that I'd like to sync to fill up that $10/mo bucket. They did used to have some smaller plans, so they must have got rid of them for a good reason.
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- avner 16y agoI love dropbox but giving it complete access to my facebook besides all my files is pretty much handing my "social life" and my "work life" to a single company.
- gst 16y agoTry Wuala or SpiderOak if you want a similar service that features client-side encryption (so the company offering the service can't read your data).
- simonista 16y agoMaybe it was just me, but I totally didn't "get it" at first that these were sort of steps that build on each other and should be done in order. 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.
- ivankirigin 16y agoThat is actually an error. Clicking follow should do the twitter auth and give you both bonuses. Thanks for pointing it out.
- treblig 16y agoI trust Dropbox immensely. I clicked all of those buttons without really reading the specifics. 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.
- nkassis 16y ago256mb for logging on to facebook? PFFFT that's 5Gb minimum. I'm 2 months without login in to Facebook now and this isn't enough to kill my downtime. Increase the incentive ;p
- cjoh 16y agoSeems to me that Dropbox will have a pretty good asset here a la rapleaf. If they get enough people to voluntarily give them their twitter and facebook IDs, Dropbox will have a very accurate lookup service of email|facebook|twitter -- that's something a lot of companies are after these days.
- ivankirigin 16y agoDropbox won't sell user data.
- dedward 16y agoCurrently.
- ivankirigin 16y agoI work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News. 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 http://www.dropbox.com/jobs Ask me anything.
- Pewpewarrows 16y agoTell everyone there to keep up the great work! I don't know how I survived before symlinking my entire life to my Dropbox account; it was just a mess of rewritable CDs, USB drives, and rsync commands. 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).
- ivankirigin 16y ago
- gst 16y agoI love Dropbox from a usability point of view, but unfortunately the missing encryption is the main reason why it's not an option for me right now. I'd like to also be able to backup sensitive data, but I don't trust the Dropbox employees with access to my data. 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).
- jemfinch 16y agoDropbox has native clients, right? There seems to be no technical reason why they don't already have encryption.
- jallmann 16y agoTry Tarsnap, which was purpose-built for secure data storage. The founder is a regular here on HN.
- zcid 16y agoI just store a TrueCrypt container on my Dropbox. It's a little clunky if you need to dismount/mount it a lot, but if your system is on 24/7 then it isn't really noticeable.
- pstinnett 16y agoNot sure the exact mechanics behind it, but it's pretty awesome to see the growl notification of my space being increased almost immediately after clicking the authorization buttons on this page. Just fits right in with Dropbox being an incredible service.
- jackowayed 16y agoThe brilliant thing about all of the free space that Dropbox "gives away" is that most people who get it (90%? more?) don't actually use it. 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).
- mitjak 16y agoThe only reason my situation is the same as yours is because the plans are a tad too pricey for me. If I could indeed afford over 20-30GB of space, I would include all my family photos and music to be uploaded to Dropbox as well. The latter could perhaps be rectified by a (hopefully upcoming) cloud music service (with a decent music catalogue), but the photos are really a problem.
- gst 16y agoEven less space is required. Dropbox stores duplicate files only once. So if many users store the same files the cost per user is practically zero. That's also the reason why uploads are so fast. If a file is already on the server it isn't uploaded again.
- almost 16y agoIs it really shared between accounts? So for example if I knew someone with Dropbox had a file that could have one of several contents and I wanted to know which of those contents they had I could try uploading the different versions and see which one uploaded faster? A little far fetched maybe, but I'm sure there's a way to exploit something somewhere using that....
- riobard 16y agoYou can test this with relatively large files. If a 100mb file finishes syncing to Dropbox within seconds over a slow DSL, you can be pretty sure that someone has already uploaded a copy there before you do.
- MikeCapone 16y agoI did all of them except the two Facebook ones. That was a bit too far for me.
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- dholowiski 16y agoThat is some insane viral marketing, other companies should take note!
- dstein 16y agoIf anything, Dropbox isn't thinking big enough. They really need to start thinking about how to provide a ubiquitous, multi-platform, private, cloud filesystem. Stop encouraging people to "back up" their files, and start using encouraging people to store the primary copy of all their files on Dropbox. On Windows, Dropbox shows up as "My Documents/My Dropbox". When really "My Documents" should be the dropbox.
- theBobMcCormick 16y agoHaving the option to set your "My Documents" folder to be your DropBox folder (without resorting to symlinks or toher trickery) might be a cool option to have, but IMHO defaulting to sharing your "My Documents" folder would be highly intrusive and rather evil. Very un-dropbox like. 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.
- da5e 16y agoThis might help. The Cleverest Ways to Use Dropbox That You're Not Using http://lifehacker.com/5527055/the-cleverest-ways-to-use-dropbox-that-youre-not-using http://lifehacker.com/5527055/the-cleverest-ways-to-use-drop... Make Dropbox Your Actual "My Documents" Folder
- marknutter 16y ago"I love Dropbox because I'm getting 128MB of space added to my account if I say this."
- rafamvc 16y agoI'm sorry, your settings for facebook are WAY over the top! Common, you want to be able to access my data anytime? What are you guys planning to do? Explain why you are asking for this. A lot of people did, I'm sure, but this is way fishy for me. I do trust dropbox (and I'm a paid user, so you have my credit card) but it is a request for access for something you do not use. Why? Please explain!
- ivankirigin 16y agoWe figured there wasn't much reason to restrict what we ask for. I'd like to verify that with data and run a test. 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.
- kingkilr 16y agoGoing to be another person to chime in to say Dropbox is awesome. I use it for passing podcast recordings back and forth with my cohost (while we're editing), as well as hosting and backing up arbitrary photos, HTML, and presentations. I still have plenty of free space (thanks to awesome stuff like this, and the 2x referrals for students), but when I hit my cap I'll have no qualms about paying.
- Luc 16y agoAfter authorizing with Twitter, I got redirected to an error page on the Dropbox site (Error (5xx)).
- brown9-2 16y agoCan someone who knows more about Facebook apps and their API than I do tell me what a company would want with permission to "Access my data any time" and "Access my photos and videos"?
- mbthomas 16y agoSpecifically regarding "Access my data any time" -- Facebook normally issues applications short-lived "access tokens" when someone uses Facebook Connect. The idea that that application can then access the data that you give it permission to during your session with that application. 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.
- fharper1961 16y agoMaybe it would be better if you could change the message before tweeting/posting to FB. I wrote something to DB that I didn't want to tweet. So I didn't do the last 2 steps, which were presumably the most important ones. I realize that not being able to change the message, is to try and ensure that the tweet is really about loving Dropbox.
- ivankirigin 16y agoYou can edit the message by clicking on the little pen icon next to the text.
- brianobush 16y agoYou guys at Dropbox rock at neat marketing gimmicks that make your users feel good about promoting the product.
- DenisM 16y agoI just received an email from someone I barely knew, to use Dropbox. He had no business sending me this email, and by sending it on his behalf you put yourself and him in this situation where both of you engage in sending SPAM. 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.
- evanmoran 16y agoAny word on supporting encryption? It seems like aside from partial sync it is the only big thing you guys are missing...
- plainOldText 16y agoThis is an amazing marketing strategy. Very simple and effective, IMHO.
- davis_m 16y agoThis let me get rid of that dangling 256MB that had been lingering since I opened the account and got the first free 256MB. That has been bothering my OCD. Now I have an even 12GB.
- winterlightning 16y agoThis idea is brilliant. Probably one of the best viral marketing campaigns I've seem. How badly did I want the extra space? I joined twitter because of it.
- loyaltyspace 16y agoThe feature I need most. From the IPhone app, I would like to be able to select a file and email the file to myself or someone else - not the link to the file. Dropbox is blocked at work but sometimes I really need to get an important file from there. I'm a paying susbcriber. Keep up the good work!
- john2x 16y agoI've performed all the tasks, but I don't think I've gotten any extra space. :(
- urza 16y agoI wish dropbox was opensource. I would like to sync via my home server, not cloud.