Using cloud services is scary. But giving a cloud service full access to all my cloud services scares the * out of me. I’m a scared person.
We haven't been actively working on it for a while, so have been considering open sourcing it. If anyone is interested in helping out with that or has ideas as to how to monetize this, drop me a line (hello@starthq.com).
Have you also considered the Pillar Project's approach? They too struggled for funding, but I rather like the connection among blockchain technology, ICO funding, and personal data tools. I think the inversion of control that these efforts are seeking is what society needs in order to have a more healthy relationship with companies (and governments).
You could have the index created locally or even just do remote calls for search to the respective API's. There's really no reason for this to be cloud-based. Maybe access token synchronization, but in this case, I think setting up all accounts on each device I have once... wouldn't be much of a trouble compared to giving them access to all my storage everywhere.
Disc: I work for Diamond.
In my opinion your service would be great if it were fully-local. This would also open up the path to full-text search for documents, without being creepy. I'm not expecting you to do that for free of course, I mean as a paid product. (Haven't dug into your current pricing details)
That said, the need for something like this almost outweighs the cost. But I so agree w/ what you're saying. That was my first thought—uh—so. much. access.
Before I sign up, I'd want to know what's safe, where, and why.
And more realistically, why not.
Diamond's working to make permissions more granular and transparent with each release. Some quick points: * we don't store the files themselves, only the metadata the service provides (e.g. file names, collaborators, paths) * we don't store service passwords (authentication is handed back to the service itself * we do on-prem installs for corporate customers and we'd consider a version of it for pro as well.
We take our first impressions on security and privacy very seriously. Happy to take some feedback on how we can improve trust.
Disc: I work for Diamond
> We take our first impressions on security and privacy very seriously.
This statement is unforutnately, NOT how you earn people's trust. Presumably your early adopters are technically inclined. Guess what, they don't care if you say "we take it seriously", they want you to show why you take it seriously. Furthermore, any large financial institution (for example) is going to say the same thing. Sure your sales guy says "we take it seriously", but you're not going to win any deals if you don't pass their security audit.
I think we're different from Rambox in the sense that we're not trying to emulate the in-service experience for many services in our own our app. Instead, the idea is create an access point to take you to the file, email or insight with less effort. As for authentication, that's handed off to the service a user is trying to authenticate (e.g. Google Accounts).
Disc: I work for Diamond