Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 152 posts

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#21

Post by novum »

stevelosh wrote: post #3

So 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.

I have several fake Twitter and Facebook accounts I keep around for exactly this reason. I certainly wouldn't connect my real accounts without knowing exactly what they plan (not) to do with my identity.

Edit: "I love Dropbox because it gives me free space even when I connect fake twitter and facebook accounts. :)"

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#22

Post by sliverstorm »

runjake wrote: post #4

Here'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.

Very 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

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#23

Post by spiffworks »

fragmede wrote: post #17
pavs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much of a feedback if you are asked why you love dropbox. I don't know why someone would _not_ love dropbox...

Closed 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.)

I 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.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#24

Post by phjohnst »

sliverstorm wrote: post #22
runjake wrote: post #4

Here'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.

Very 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

I 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.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#25

Post by cjoh »

Seems 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.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#26

Post by ivankirigin »

I 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

Ask me anything.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#27

Post by gst »

I 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).

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#28

Post by gst »

avner wrote: post #14

I 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.

Try 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).

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#29

Post by pstinnett »

Not 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.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#30

Post by jackowayed »

The 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).

Post reply on HN