The Fridge (YC S10) Takes The Privacy Headaches Out Of Sharing
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Why would you use the Fridge instead of what you are doing right now? With Facebook most people don't really know how to customize their privacy settings and you have no idea how all your friends have it set. If someone shares something with you how do you know their settings aren't public?
And using email has it's own set of problems like long reply alls. Subject matter gets lost in branched conversations. People get added or deleted along the way and emails get lost in a sea of email bankruptcy.
We aren't solving that problem but trying to provide a better platform to interact in groups.
Here's what I learned:
1. your everyday photo taker won't pay for using a photo sharing site
2. little revenue means assets are measured in the number of users
3. viral adoption is needed to get to a large number of users
4. certain features limit viral adoption
5. people hardly ever upload private photos
6. private photos are only shared with a handful of people
7. photos suck up bandwidth and hard drive space like none other
8. there are lots of other photo sharing competitors
Based on all this and about a 100 other observation points (like nobody was going to acquire the current offering) I considered doing a simple offering called FotoFluff. The idea was to create a 'fluff', a collection of photos, and then assign three URLs to it. One to view, one to allow adding, and one to allow edit/delete. You'd only need the URL to do stuff to it, so you could IM it around, or post it in public if you dared. Propegation and commenting was left to the linking sites. Viewing privacy was only as good as the users kept the URL to themselves. Display of the photos was all on one page, with an API to do more if you wanted. Like Imgur, without logins. Delete stuff that never got viewed, or was older than X many days.
I just don't think I'd try this again. I'd say it's a damn tough nut to crack.
Then the cofounder is referenced (not quoted) saying their goal is to create a social graph across groups by interest.
To me that sounds like a contradiction. How is this not selling users on privacy at the outset while intending to "convince" them down the road that privacy was never what they wanted?
The connections between groups only happens when people you get to know in one group start to build a real relationship that expands outside of that current group's context and lead to the creation of another group whether for another shared interest, or temporary event.
As people create more and more of these groups and these "mini-Facebooks" start to overlap users a new social graph starts to take shape not based on a 1 to 1 friend request but on real relationships, topics, and events.
As more of these groups are formed we aren't exposing what groups you are in to other people joining. In fact other people joining don't know who else is on the platform unless they are in a group with them.
So this social graph that is being built isn't based on friend requests that have little inherent value but on the different groups you are part of that are based on specific relationships.
The biggest question I have is, how do you get people into your site in the first place? I would love to use The Fridge, but if my friends don't, what's the point?
We have tried to make it super easy to start and join a Fridge. Just enter your email to create a group. To invite folks send them the group invite URL. All they have to do to join that group is click on it and enter their email and create a password. Hopefully this is a first step in making it dead simple to bring folks in to join or crate any group that needs a bit more privacy or is just a temporary network around an event so you don't have to friend people on facebook.
1) Where is the link to the tour of the the fridge? I can't seem to find it.
2) Is there an RSS feed? Otherwise I will just forget to go there
3) Why didn't you make this 4 years ago?
You could ask that same question about anything ever created.
He wasn't being literal - he was saying, "This seems awesome and I wish I had this four years ago." Is this an American thing? I see it all the time in the States, but after thinking about it I don't think I saw it in Europe or Asia.
It does make sense to classify relationships and share based on those classifications, but I bet there is a better way.
Maybe there's a difference if you do not trust their competence, rather than their intentions. You have recourse there, though: it's easier to test (or improve) someone's competence than to do the same for someone's intentions.
Place a demo group on the home page. It's very hard to figure out what this site does from the minimal home page.
Make a single click demo group with full functionality, (but reset it every hour or so to avoid it collecting too much spam). Or even better, set a cookie, and new users will always get a fresh demo, which those with a cookie will be able to keep modifying their private demo for a while.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Or supply a demo email address.
They could make something that exploits their social graph, kinda like Aardvark, but that again is something really long term. So, what is their value proposition in making users join right now?
We have tried to make the sign up and group creation as simple as possible so any event or social gathering can be another use for the fridge. A crazy frat party, potluck dinner, family vacation. anything where you have a temporary social network for people to come together around, start socializing and if it dies ok. but if you make a few new relationships and create a new group or two with them that is the goal...
We know we need better tools to bring people in. But we are noticing once people are in with a few friends and groups they love our platform.
When you share something on the internet, you are relinquishing control of it. Someone can always manually redistribute content you create (for instance, saving a photo you share with them). As such, you should never put content on the internet you never want being made public.
But most people don't because it's challenging enough. The idea of these startups isn't to achieve perfection as much as to make it a little more safer for you to share stuff.
Unintentional sharing on facebook is solely caused by its horrendous interface. The interface makes it too hard to precisely determine what is being shared to whom. Given that cognitive faculties and time are limited resources, the average user will not have time to decipher facebook's sharing settings. The result is they have a high likelihood of unintentionally sharing information, resulting in privacy concerns.
In real life, if I tell something to a trusted former high school friend living in a different state, I can assume at over 98% confidence that my boss at work will never know the content of the conversation. They are two completely distinct social circles, or groups of friends. The channel of communication is different for different groups of friends. This is how real life works.
People expect a well designed website to work in the same way.
But because each is separate and you can communicate freely within each group and not worry that it might accidentally get shared to another group you start to see more meaningful engagement.
Now no one can prevent someone from taking a screen shot and sending it out but like hosting a house party you trust that your guests won't be jumping on your furniture or tearing down the wallpaper (unless it is that kind of party...)
However we are going to stay focused on the socialization aspect of groups and try to address this notion of simple, private, and/or temporary. Definitely more to come!
I know this doesn't completely solve the problem but to me unless it was really locked down somehow it doesn't differ enough from what facebook are offering.
Like i said earlier these groups are like a themed house party or potluck where you only invite your friends you know are interested in the theme and trust them to bring a good dish and not jump on the furniture.
Other than that I like the idea and fact that this type of system helps facilitate more conversation than a traditional "group" site.
Small change I recommend: make the "Add photos and post" button more visible. Now you have to put the cursor in the post field for it to become visible.
I wish you all the luck.
I might be interested in using it, but startups fail sometimes, and I would not like all my info to be lost if this happens.
Hopefully we don't go down before we get that up...!
Along with nearly every other SSO solution short of LDAP, OpenID infuriatingly only authenticates the username — it provides no means whatsoever for context about the user, much less group membership.
Brad Fitzpatrick (the creator of OpenID and founder of LiveJournal) has been working on a new protocol called WebFinger to add context to usernames, but so far they've avoided trying to codify a mechanism for group membership.
Or at the bare minimum, secure the login so password details aren't sent as plain text over an unsecured channel
Edit: To clarify, he was -3 when I wrote that comment.
Facebook started to deteriorate when they made it even harder to group friends. Before it was really simple to assign someone to a certain friend-group at the same time you accept their friend request, this functionality appears to have been removed.
Facebook would be vastly better if the interface was simply more group oriented. If grouping friends as you add them was front and center. A group list, where each friend-group element contains links to functionality such as: what you share with this group, news feed\number of new posts of this group, number online to chat in this group.
Would be vastly better than having a list of groups for newsfeed, list of groups tucked away under privacy settings, list of groups tucked away in chat box. Friend Groups are parents of features rather than Features being parents of friend groups. It just plain psychologically works better.
I think facebook is a genuinely useful site compromised by a shit interface. The facebook interface is like urban sprawl: an uncontrolled expansion that ocassionally gets band-aids rather than a centralized plan based on User Experience.
this is one of the reasons why we build the Fridge. It is hard to filter and organize your friends into lists, keep track of the privacy settings for those lists and then hope that the people you are friends with have done the same thing on Facebook. People are either not posting real content anymore, not using their real name or are just boring on Facebook
The Fridge interface organized not by friend requests but by groups. Each group is completely private from any other group with it's own news feed where everyone can contribute whether it is for a personal and private conversation, common interests of a specific group, or temporary networks that come together for events, parties, or any social gathering.
People are invited to groups and people follow groups. If you get bored of a group you can leave. If the event or activity is over you can start another group around another event or activity based new or on going relationships.