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I'm personally really excited to get an invite! I think that invite systems are a great way of doing a controlled rollout while building hype. I think we're ab

by rgbrgb 14y ago

I'm personally really excited to get an invite! I think that invite systems are a great way of doing a controlled rollout while building hype. I think we're about to see a new generation of apps that take advantage of user-owned file storage. For years, native apps have stored all of their data on hardware users own. Now that everyone basically has some kind of always-on file server, I think we'll be able to do similar architectures in the cloud. Imagine if we built the next Instagram by storing all the photos entirely in the user's Dropbox and just have a heavy caching layer on ec2. I'm working on a platform right now that should make building this kind of app pretty easy. I think there's room for all of the competitors in the space to benefit from this paradigm shift.

pseut 14y ago
I mean, I was excited to get an invite to google wave. Then I couldn't figure out what to use it for, didn't have any friends using it, etc... which has been my experience with app.net so far as well. I find it a little ironic that you view dropbox as "user owned file storage." I don't have a dropbox account and don't want one. I'm happy to pay for (and I do pay for) a separate service that gives me webdav file access, but it seems like it's less and less common for programs/apps to support that. (please support that in your platform!)
- rgbrgb 14y ago
  I feel like I own my storage on Dropbox to about the same extent that I own it on S3. Do you not feel like you own cloud storage? Is it because we're just renters? I'm really quite curious what you find ironic.
  - pseut 14y ago
    A big part of "ownership" for me is the ability to replace the service with my own machine, whether I actually do that or not. So (for example) I'd have less ownership over the gmail account <whomever@gmail.com> than one with a custom domain, even if I chose to forward everything to gmail or use google apps. I haven't looked into it at all, but my understanding is that it would be hard or impossible to point applications to a self-hosted dropbox replacement; compare that to, for example, github where I could replace it if I wanted to fairly easily (at least for the small, personal projects I keep there; this probably becomes less true for larger projects, so take it as an example of my thought process rather than a statement about the "ownership" of data on github).

by rgbrgb 14y ago

pseut 14y ago

I mean, I was excited to get an invite to google wave. Then I couldn't figure out what to use it for, didn't have any friends using it, etc... which has been my experience with app.net so far as well. I find it a little ironic that you view dropbox as "user owned file storage." I don't have a dropbox account and don't want one. I'm happy to pay for (and I do pay for) a separate service that gives me webdav file access, but it seems like it's less and less common for programs/apps to support that. (please support that in your platform!)

rgbrgb 14y ago
I feel like I own my storage on Dropbox to about the same extent that I own it on S3. Do you not feel like you own cloud storage? Is it because we're just renters? I'm really quite curious what you find ironic.
- pseut 14y ago
  A big part of "ownership" for me is the ability to replace the service with my own machine, whether I actually do that or not. So (for example) I'd have less ownership over the gmail account <whomever@gmail.com> than one with a custom domain, even if I chose to forward everything to gmail or use google apps. I haven't looked into it at all, but my understanding is that it would be hard or impossible to point applications to a self-hosted dropbox replacement; compare that to, for example, github where I could replace it if I wanted to fairly easily (at least for the small, personal projects I keep there; this probably becomes less true for larger projects, so take it as an example of my thought process rather than a statement about the "ownership" of data on github).