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Doesn't dropbox essentially have infinite potential? Pictures folders shared with your contacts and you have flickr etc. A shared music folder and spotify/groo
by jayzee 15y ago
Doesn't dropbox essentially have infinite potential?
Pictures folders shared with your contacts and you have flickr etc. A shared music folder and spotify/grooveshark etc?
Basically an infrastructure company in the most elemental and violently grand sense of the word?
- Hisoka 15y agoUmm... An ordinary GUI with folders to share pictures is not Flickr. No photographer, or ordinary person will want to use that to share photos...
- patio11 15y agoI have successfully gotten family members to use two, count them, two ways to share photos, out of a dozen I suggested. #1: Dropbox. #2: http://www.eye.fi/ http://www.eye.fi/ , which my mother uses to get photos on Facebook despite having no understanding of the file system metaphor. Personally, I use Dropbox. It's super elegant in terms of the UX for my girlfriend. I take photos, drop them in my Dropbox folder, and send her an email. She makes with the clickyclicky on the magic blue bit. Bam, vacation photos. We both managed to screw things up, frequently, when I was trying to send her photos on Flickr without opening them to the entire Internet. Dropbox makes it a one-click operation for her, and I can manage drag-and-drop on most days.
- matthewcieplak 15y agoIf you're trying to share galleries on dropbox but not to the whole internet, you should try views.fm: http://www.views.fm http://www.views.fm
- georgieporgie 15y agohttp://www.eye.fi/ http://www.eye.fi/ Thanks for posting that, I had no idea that any such device had actually made it onto the market!
- jonknee 15y agoWhy wouldn't an ordinary person want to use it to share photos? Plug in camera, transfer images, right-click and copy the gallery link or hit share. It can't be any easier for the ordinary person.
- gordonc 15y agoDropbox's GUI does need some work for presentation, which is why me and a friend built an app on top of Dropbox precisely for that: views.fm Actually just released a new slideshow feature to present photos!
- damoncali 15y agoNo. There aren't enough pictures.
- shahan 15y ago> Basically an infrastructure company in the most elemental and violently grand sense of the word? (a) I love this sentence, and (b) this is probably why people are so excited about Dropbox, myself included. But, the potential of a company is not equal to the potential of its product category (unless it's a monopoly that lasts for all time).
- esurc 15y agoYou're describing S3, not their customer Dropbox. Adding a sharing layer on top is something easily replicable.
- jonknee 15y ago> Adding a sharing layer on top is something easily replicable. Considering that Dropbox is the one company that has just "made it work", I wouldn't be so sure of that. Syncing isn't always easy and at scale the problems are that much bigger. Mix in cross platform issues (not just Mac/Windows, but mobile too) and it gets that much more interesting.
- esurc 15y agoThere's a subtle difference between "sharing" (which I was talking about) and "syncing." The examples in the previous comment focused on sharing (music sharing, photo sharing) and thus were really about the magic of cloud storage like S3, not anything unique added by Dropbox. You're absolutely right that syncing is a classically hard problem that Dropbox has addressed impressively well for consumers.