New Dropbox API v1 with search and revision | Hacker News Reader

New Dropbox API v1 with search and revision

dropbox.com

71 pointsedwincheese11 comments

I am a little turned off by the fact that I have to log in to view this information. What is the point? Is this now Facebook?

I'm interested in the API but don't feel as though I should have to alert Dropbox, by being forced to login, that I am interested in it in order to learn more.

This is only why its in beta...

Really? Going a bit far, I'd say. Logging in on the web is a fairly trivial task, and I'd argue that there's a good business reason to gauge interest in a consumer API before dumping a ton of man hours into building it.

Right, and they can gauge interest easily and anonymously without requiring me to tell them specifically that I am interested in it.

I value my privacy and find it silly that I have to log in. They offer no information as to why I must log in, I am just hit with a log in page. If this were under an NDA or something and it was an agreement into which I entered willingly, I would not be so opposed. As it is, they are simply farming my data and I don't like giving that up freely.

I think there is the growing problem that most people are increasingly willing to divulge their personal information, specifically online, and then have a backlash at anyone who doesn't feel comfortable doing so. It's trivial you say, just as it would be trivial for me to be forced to show identification whenever I get on a bus, but that doesn't mean I am going to be alright with doing so. Like the argument that only people who have anything to hide advocate for privacy. This example may sound a bit extreme but it is essentially the same argument.

Anyway, you're entitled to your own opinion, but I don't think it's going too far to be perturbed at giving up some of my privacy to look at an API.

What's the penalty for lying to Dropbox with useless email information?

Loggly's site and app are on two completely different stacks. The app is what you log into, and most of it sits behind authentication. I'm speculating here, but if we were to do some type of semi-automated documentation, it would PROBABLY sit behind authentication as well, as it would live in the app side of the house. Not because we wanted to 'track' someone. We can do that when you write a program and then test it! :P

I'm certainly not speaking for Dropbox here, but my point is that there do exist reasons why a company might want you to log in to see documentation. Maybe you are on a beta trial of V3.0 of the APIs, and need to see alternate docs, or some of the examples require you to have a hash that is used in examples, or...etc.

Seems to me you are being a bit pedantic. I doubt seriously that Dropbox is going to violate your privacy.

Dropbox are making a play to be the storage platform for all your cloud data. I.e I design a wiz bang SaaS collaboration app using their API and you get "control" of your data.

Justifies the valuation if they can pull it off..

I don't really understand Dropbox's strategy. As a service, Dropbox does one thing pretty well – syncing data so that users can get a more or less seamless online/offline experience using data that's shared on multiple devices.

However, sharing a Dropbox with other people is a disaster. Anyone can delete or change anything in a shared volume. No access control is offered at all. All invited users are treated as fully trusted users by default.

I suppose you could use the API to roll your own access control, but it baffles me that the default sharing defaults to such a potentially disastrous setting.

Their documentation claims its because it's impossible to retain cross-platform access control settings, but that seems wrong – why not just verify access via the Dropbox app layer instead of trying to embed permissions metadata at the OS layer?

Well, there is the web interface for read-only. For write-only I suppose there is simply emailing a file to the person who owns the Dropbox. For accidental/malicious deletes there is version rollback as well as one's personal drive backups. I think in order for sharing to "just work" there must be limits to the way ordinary users can accidentally change settings. For those who absolutely require levels of access there are alternatives, just as there are alternatives for those who require something specific which Dropbox does not provide in every other aspect of file-sharing.

The strategy is that they need to grow their company and potential revenue sourcing methods. The strategy for many is to build an ecosystem; for them, having developers that make it super easy to to put any kind of information anywhere into the cloud is going to cause users to mindlessly start using it as their online hard drive, and thus push more users from free to paid, thus capturing more revenue. The mobile future means that even more uncapturable data now becomes capturable in digital form, and they want people to store on their services. Sharing is awesome for them as it eats into both people's storage for the same amount of data on the cloud, so it's basically pure profit.

I've been using their API and I have to say it has to move slightly faster if that's to happen. As they've said in the announcement, it's been a year since the last update. Admittedly my app is not a realization of their vision per se -- mine is a Dropbox client, not an app using Dropbox as storage -- but the API is the same.

Good updates though, ability to get a share link, search results. Both are features that users of my product have been asking for.

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