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Show HN: SocialFolders, "Dropbox for social"
Hey fellow HN-ers,
I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word).
We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale.
We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ
If you want to try it out, you can download the app (for free of course) on socialfolders.me.
Thanks for your feedback. Next step: adding a kitty to the video and sending it to Mashable!
Edit: upvote the clickable links if you can please :)
- martinpannier 15y agoClickable links: screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ, website: http://socialfolders.me http://socialfolders.me
- instakill 15y agoLovely demo video. Who made that for you?
- martinpannier 15y agoThe screencast parts are home-made, Screenflow FTW. The first 30" were made by a freelance on Elance.
- iusable 15y agolol serious hustle! Love this execution!!
- iusable 15y agoLOL! Here we go again. Now I can't even comment to praise somebody. Flame away guys :)
- brador 15y agoHow much did that freelancer cost (approx.)? Also, "Hero + 3 below" just works, I suggest changing the front page to that layout for greater impact.
- martinpannier 15y ago$800 His original video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ZgtOZJVKE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ZgtOZJVKE Edit: sorry, didn't get the part about the "Hero + 3 below". Care to explain?
- brador 15y agoGrid design system. Hero (one big unit in middle of the screen) +3 (3 smaller units just below). I tried to find a quick example with blank content, but this is the best I can pull at short notice: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/hero.html http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/hero.html Question: Are you guys funded? Looking for funding? and do you store the data serverside in addition to the users device?
- martinpannier 15y agoGot it, thanks! Answer: no - yes - no
- mattmanser 15y agoIsn't it really just fashionable at the moment? Saying 'it just works' is a bit like saying 'Hush Puppies will always be cool' in the 90s. I'm already getting tired of bootstrap sites to be honest. I think it's going to end up backfiring on twitter in that their design will look very generic and boring because everyone's using bootstrap.
- entropie 15y agoA simple upvote isnt enough. Awesome idea! Edit: please give us a linux client.
- david_a_r_kemp 15y agoPlease give us a cli linux client, so I can run it on my NAS
- spindritf 15y agoBeing able to run it without GUI, on a server or NAS, as you mentioned, would be great -- better connection, always online, perfect fit for a software like that.
- martinpannier 15y agoPlanned for Q2 - more to be truly cross-platform than by popular demand, to be frank :)
- iusable 15y agoThis 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.
- martinpannier 15y agoShoot your questions! Here or martin@socialfolders.me
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- ed209 15y agoPromising 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/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/ ?
- martinpannier 15y agoActually we have! We're in contact with Jaisen Mathai to integrate the OpenPhoto project ASAP. Thanks for the feedback we're going to integrate easy folder sharing as soon as humanly can! :)
- webmat 15y agoSharing with the parents FTW! The service is looking great, and I'm glad you guys have a clear (and super reasonable at 9.99$/year) business model from the start!
- RobertKohr 15y agoThe price really should be in the FAQ. I am guessing that it is the most frequently asked question. I don't want to go through your funnels before I get hit with a price.
- dmragone 15y agoI concur - please put pricing in the FAQ. It's a great service, you shouldn't hide the cost. Maybe I'm missing it on the front page, but I couldn't find the price anywhere (and only saw that the download is free, which is different from the price of the service, and of course holds no value without the service).
- martinpannier 15y agoYou're absolutely right! Will add ASAP
- mikeknoop 15y agoI'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.
- martinpannier 15y agoWait until we get out or geolocated mobile app too!
- peteforde 15y agoCool idea, but my $0.02 is that this would be a distraction from your core value proposition. Nobody signing up for this is thinking "man, I can't wait for the geolocated iPhone app version". Focus on the core!
- Simucal 15y agoI figured he was being sarcastic.
- martinpannier 15y agoI was.
- peteforde 15y agoOh man. Well, that was embarrassing.
- drtse4 15y agoNice idea and beautifully implemented, you just gained a new user. The "moving between services" is the real killer feature, imo.
- vineet 15y agoI 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.
- Stenerson 15y agoI agree. I thought it looked neat until the last 30 seconds, once I saw the drag and drop uploads I needed to have it.
- inspiredworlds 15y agothe last minute or so is brilliant. shows how easy it is. its actually quite painful sometimes to upload pics to various online albums. one easy solution would be good. I actually thought that dropbox would be doing something like this in the future.
- instakill 15y agoI am the only one that gets a time-out when trying to download the app?
- martinpannier 15y agoShouldn't be any problems the file is hosted on S3… Weird. Can you try again and shoot me an email at martin@socialfolders.me if it still doesn't work?
- yatsyk 15y agoHow can you compare it to Locker [1] ? [1] https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker
- martinpannier 15y agoMainly, we're file-based and we mirror all file mgmt operations on your computer. So you always have your content with you. And any offline edits (to your SocialFolders Google Docs for example) is applied online as soon as you reconnect. And we have a business model.
- pabloPXL 15y agoThanks! I didn't know this project and looks pretty awesome :)
- webmat 15y agoThe "remember me" option on the login doesn't seem to work. Not a big deal, but just pointing it out :-)
- lazylland 15y agoThis 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 !
- joeconway 15y agoThis 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.
- adir1 15y agoSorry - this is so last century. We are heading Into the Cloud, not into "get my social content to my PC" era...
- entropie 15y agoYou are wrong. Some people still want their (private) data in one place - on the harddrive.
- adir1 15y agoI had 3 hard-drives fail on my home computers, in the last month alone. Are you sure that's where you want your private data to be?
- martinpannier 15y agoYeah I mean you are sooo right, look at Photo Stream! I mean, Photo Stream is SO last century. Hmmm.
- adir1 15y agoAfraid so - I love Apple devices, but Photo Stream is completely unusable to me. Why should I take up all that precious mobile device space with many copies of my Photos - of which I have thousands to begin with? If you have 10 photos and clueless about how to upload them - perhaps it's something that would be neat for you...
- kmfrk 15y agoGreat 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. :)
- martinpannier 15y agoThanks kmfrk (a mouthful) We'll try and make the website more friendly. As ever, juggling with multiple priorities. We're in SF, haven't seen people throwing themselves at us just yet, but can't wait :)
- davezatch 15y agoJust 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.
- martinpannier 15y agoThanks Dave, I'll fix it ASAP
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- djbender 15y agoIf 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?
- oozcitak 15y agoGreat idea and beautiful execution. I just copy/pasted a few photos from Instagram to Facebook. I will definitely use this.
- carlsednaoui 15y agoSweet video! I would suggest adding a clickable link on your youtube video description.
- leouznw 15y agogreat 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...
- mikecaron 15y agoThis looks like a great frontend for FUSE (or MacFUSE by Google, http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). I think you guys nailed the user experience because FUSE can be really difficult to setup for n00bs.
- martinpannier 15y agoI'd totally forgotten about that project, used to use it with MacFusion. We'll check out the project again to see which of the services we could integrate (or what code/libs we could use).
- tuananh 15y agoGreat 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?
- martinpannier 15y agoYep - for now We are evaluating the feasability of using symlinks (the problem being cross-platform execution).
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y agoIt'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.
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- allenwong 15y agoDoes it has an iPhone or android app? I think you can do something like "All in one" social box! I really need it!
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- quanfucius 15y agoSo what happens when I copy my SocialFolder into my Dropbox folder? Does the universe implode? :D
- rheeseyb 15y agoLooks 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...
- martinpannier 15y agoAgreed. We're working on a better menu bar icon. Will have small blue rotating arrows :)
- rheeseyb 15y agoNice :)
- AndrewWarner 15y ago1) 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.
- martinpannier 15y agoPlease direct support requests to martin@socialfolders.me I'll take a look at your account to see what went wrong - send me your email. Agreed on the 1-way sync. Good idea!
- bobwebb 15y agoThis 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.
- neilk 15y agoIf I modify a file locally, does that get mirrored elsewhere? Also, I assume that such modifications aren't propagated to the other copies?
- martinpannier 15y agoYes & you assume correctly.
- kin 15y agoI can find so much use from this. Great job!
- instakill 15y agoThe 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.
- w33ble 15y agoI'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!
- alias1 15y agoVery 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.
- aDemoUzer 15y agoGreat idea. http://socialfolders.me/download-pc/ http://socialfolders.me/download-pc/ screenshots looks crappy.
- edbyrne 15y agoExport/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.