Receivd - beautiful, fast filesharing for everyone
receivd.com
receivd.com
> Receivd - beautiful, fast filesharing for everyone
Everyone who has a Mac? Or everyone? I only see screenshots of a Mac app. There are sketches of other apps, but I'm guessing those do not exist yet.
“Real time file sharing” as a tagline seems kind of meaningless. Two reasons I don't like it: a) real-time seems overly technical, and b) real-time is implied. No one expects that there would be a delay (beyond the amount of time it takes to send the file.)
Finally, this seems like it occupies a weird grey area between dropbox and email. All the examples you give are things that I can easily do with email. If email proves to be too much of a hassle, I have to convince people to use something else, and teach them how it works. Between this and dropbox, why do I choose this?
Minor point: To look at all 4 screenshots in large-o-vision, I have to first click one, then close it, click the next, and so on. Arrows within the lightbox would be appreciated.
Also, I realize this sounds kind of harsh, but I don't mean it too—I'm just putting out there the first things that come to mind. I think there actually is room between dropbox and email, but you're going to have to work a little bit on positioning your product properly to define that space.
I got this message when signing up for access and I have to ask: Why would I tell people on Twitter and Facebook about this if I haven't gotten a chance to use it yet?
Do this at late at night (like I did) and delete your FB post after you get the email (like I did).
Alternately, you can go the whole +hn route described below. It took longer than the FB route, but at least you're not participating in marketing of a sight-unseen web service.
Anyway, email+hn@domain.com gets you access today without having to share.
I need someone to hate for this. Was Flickr first?
The motivation wasn't to sound hip and cool, but rather to find a domain name that some squatting piece of trash wasn't asking eleventy million dollars for.
I've purchased 2 domains in the past 3 years: hackerstream and readwarp[1]. Perhaps you think they both have something wrong with them. But I contend that they're both better than del.icio.us or receivd. (Too bad that isn't all there is to a project.)
[1] In general I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of the namespace is still available. Both times I thought up a name in the shower after a few weeks of building it, and was pleasantly surprised to find my first attempt was available. Take it, done, and "find a domain name" was never even on my todo list.
What's with the even? Do you honestly think that is surprising?
[Citation needed] on three counts:
1. What does language "devolution" even mean?
2. Is English actually "devolving"?
3. Are domain naming trends in any way related to that?
As for point 2: yes, English is certainly devolving. I graded papers in college -- "u" and "lol" and "tho" being present in an academic paper is a worrying trend. The writing ability of the average college-aged person that I observed personally worried me about the future of prose, and educationally we're not doing anything about it (the guilty parties also don't care). Admittedly, my sample size is small, but I can't imagine this isn't the case elsewhere.
It isn't limited to English, either. My U.S. History class in high school did a hell of a job teaching me about the plight of Asian-American immigrants at Ellis Island in the 20th century (that was our first lesson), but completely skipped the 18th and 19th centuries. The new American education.
Languages have always changed, and grumpy old men have always complained about how those changes are destroying the language. But despite that perpetual cycle of corruption lasting for thousands of years, we are in fact not communicating by pointing and grunting.
- Grumpy Old Man
I'm 24.
Genuine question. Consider it a lead for how to change the landing page for more clarity discussion.
We're optimizing the landing page as we go along. The difference is the ease-of-use, and the ability for non-technical folks to pick it up really quickly and get started with sharing files with the people they care about in a few minutes. Not sure if you noticed, but the current landing page is not designed with hackers in mind (we understand we're posting on HN, but technical folks are not our primary audience).
That is, what should be compelling me to download another application to do that which I can (seemingly) accomplish with one already installed?
I'm not trying to be simply critical, but rather just pointing out that, at least from the landing page, there isn't anything necessarily motivating me to sign up. (That said, as it's on HN, I'd love to sign up, if only to provide feedback!)
We love Dropbox and use it everyday, but we feel that Receivd does sharing the way that most consumers understand. For example, people move stuff out of shared folders all the time, which deletes it for everybody else - just a consequence of the tech. We do know that Dropbox is killing it, and as loyal customers we're very happy for them and wish them well.
However, some people I share folders with do use it as a transfer mechanism and remove the files from it.
That is, for what I can see with Receivd the user explicitly "opens" an app (as they're used to doing for almost anything else on their computer), which in turn clearly states "drag and drop files here to share."
With Dropbox the user needs to understand the concept of a shared folder that "magically" syncs with other computers. For many users this is an alien concept and may confuse them. I know of many people who have a Dropbox account, yet use the service exclusively through the web interface, simply because typing a URL, logging in, browsing for a file, clicking and downloading it is a concept they "get."
There's no such thing as "one size fits all" in this world---specially when it comes to user interface design.
Edit: I should clarify I do not work for Receivd, nor have any connection with the team, so I don't speak for them. This is just my assessment as a UI designer.
I don't know how far dragging and dropping files is going to get them (many of my users could not locate a file if it bit them on the nose), but hey, it might work.
I don't see anywhere that myaddress@email.com and myaddress#this@email.com must send to the same mailbox. I only see that an address must "[contain] a locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character."
Of course, this means that you can use - or ~ or # in your address but they don't have to be treated (and probably aren't) treated as the same address by most email systems.
Your product is slick. I can see myself convincing a customer to use this, which is not something I could say for Dropbox.
I'm not sure why people are talking about the landing page, domain name, and other irrelevant stuff. Dropbox is really good at syncing files across systems, but not that great for sharing files quickly and effortlessly. Receivd in my opinion is trying to solve this problem.
I'm using it now, and it's so close to being exactly what I need, with two necessary pivots that seem almost predestined to happen from your current position. The current basis of it being an inbox for files is already on the right track, and something I haven't seen attempted before, but it needs a little more verisimilitude to email:
1) The requirement to invite / induce signup / confirm "connections" needs to be ruthlessly optimized out — I should be able to just send a file to any email easily, forming a 'weak' connection. Maybe they have to do a 3 second signup to download the file, but it needs to be all in one motion. This obviously brings up a ton of issues like how to display the now 4 types of connections and unsolicited files, but it's essential to you getting traction.
2) 'sent' files need to behave like a outbox — remember that one of the biggest uses of email attachments is just sending stuff to yourself. Really you should just implement that straight up, it's the biggest use I'd have, and one I think you would find yourself as soon as you get the iOS client going. The dropbox iOS app's UI is terrible for it (pick one photo at a time and wait), plus really the filesystem metaphor is all wrong anyway! I actually want the transactional inbox feel of email here. If you don't explicitly support this I'm just going to end up using it with a computers account and an iPhone account.
1. You can send a file to any email right now - once you invite an email, they'll be greyed out in the sidebar, then drag any files to them as you would with a confirmed user. They don't even have to signup to download the file. You can even add those folks to a list.
2. Interesting point. We'll think more about this.
Thanks a lot for your comments. Can we reach you directly somehow to figure out why you're seeing these issues?
I can send a file to any email now, but there's a lot of sharp edges. You make me click through a modal sheet wizard to intentionally setup a contact first, there should really be an email textbox / fb friend selector / etc. in your app. The worst part about the current setup is that it forces you to first send a no-context invite email minutes before sending a meaningful "x has shared y with you" email. The first kind of email really needs to only ever get sent when a user is explicitly inviting other people to share with them, which is probably not going to be the default path.
My email is in the 'about' area of my profile if you want to reach me.
What's the advantage over Dropbox? Does your service go through a central server, or is it more p2p? Or both? Are my files encrypted on your server? Storage or bandwidth caps?
What? Whose email client does this?
EDIT: Functionality is quite different than drop.io and less anonymous in terms of sharing (though powerful for sharing with small groups or individuals). It would be great to get a private URL for each item shared, a la google docs.
You can actually get a shareable URL for each item you share. Just right click on a file and select Copy Public Link.
In my nominal browser view, all I see above the fold is a logo the size of an elephant, a blank field labeled "Submit", and what looks like screencaps from iTunes.
Seems like the functionality could be copied pretty quickly...