Show HN: SocialFolders, "Dropbox for social" | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SocialFolders, "Dropbox for social"

187 pointsmartinpannier73 comments

Hey fellow HN-ers,

I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word).

We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale.

We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ

If you want to try it out, you can download the app (for free of course) on socialfolders.me.

Thanks for your feedback. Next step: adding a kitty to the video and sending it to Mashable!

Edit: upvote the clickable links if you can please :)

View on HN

Clickable links: screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ, website: http://socialfolders.me

Great project! I remember seeing the possibilities of something along these lines, when I browsed the recipes of ifttt that crawled your social feeds for photos by yourself and others and saved them in your Dropbox folder. If this folder were shareable, it would create a different social network all by itself! And better yet, I wouldn't have to sign up for silly social networks and Facebook in order to get access to that data.

I don't know if this is disruptive, but I hope this will help break the data lock-ins networks like Facebook and Twitter photo services are using to retain and attract users. (And what happens if one of the sites go belly-up with all your data?)

If I could make one suggestions, the site as it currently is looks like one for a generic software download. You should, eventually, try to make it look more friendly and inviting as if to say that this is a social ecosystem of sorts.

Best of luck! If you're in SF or NYC, you probably won't need it with all the people who'll throw themselves at you over a great idea like this. :)

Thanks kmfrk (a mouthful)

We'll try and make the website more friendly. As ever, juggling with multiple priorities.

We're in SF, haven't seen people throwing themselves at us just yet, but can't wait :)

Just a heads up, if you click on "Getting Started" at the bottom it sends you to the "getting-started-mac" page, and the download is for mac. If I click directly on "download" it knows I'm on windows, but through the getting started vector it serves me the wrong link.

Otherwise, looks amazing, gonna give it a whirl after work.

Thanks Dave, I'll fix it ASAP

I'm definitely not your client base as the few things I do put on social profiles all come from my hard drive anyway, so I have no need to back up or export them.

That said, this service looks very slick and kmfrk makes a great point about using it to liberate your photos and such and make them available to people that don't have accounts. For example, links to facebook photos are useless for me since I don't have an account there, but if the people uploading their photos there could also have them mirrored to SocialFolders or even another network where I either have an account or don't need an account to view them, that would be sweet. If they could have that happen without doing anything extra on their own (after installing the software, of course), that would be pretty amazing!

A simple upvote isnt enough. Awesome idea!

Edit: please give us a linux client.

Please give us a cli linux client, so I can run it on my NAS

Being able to run it without GUI, on a server or NAS, as you mentioned, would be great -- better connection, always online, perfect fit for a software like that.

Planned for Q2 - more to be truly cross-platform than by popular demand, to be frank :)

Promising start. My mum is always on at me to send her the pics of my daughter that I put on Facebook. It would be cool if I could grant her access to my Facebook folder (at the moment I accomplish this through dropbox) but your product removes a couple of steps. Will certainly keep an eye on this one :)

Have you seen http://theopenphotoproject.org/ ?

Actually we have! We're in contact with Jaisen Mathai to integrate the OpenPhoto project ASAP.

Thanks for the feedback we're going to integrate easy folder sharing as soon as humanly can! :)

Sharing with the parents FTW!

The service is looking great, and I'm glad you guys have a clear (and super reasonable at 9.99$/year) business model from the start!

The price really should be in the FAQ. I am guessing that it is the most frequently asked question.

I don't want to go through your funnels before I get hit with a price.

I concur - please put pricing in the FAQ. It's a great service, you shouldn't hide the cost. Maybe I'm missing it on the front page, but I couldn't find the price anywhere (and only saw that the download is free, which is different from the price of the service, and of course holds no value without the service).

You're absolutely right! Will add ASAP

I'll admit I was initially turned off by the title of the post . It's really "buzz word" heavy -- but I checked out the YouTube video demo anyway and this is a great and much needed tool.

Wait until we get out or geolocated mobile app too!

Cool idea, but my $0.02 is that this would be a distraction from your core value proposition.

Nobody signing up for this is thinking "man, I can't wait for the geolocated iPhone app version".

Focus on the core!

I figured he was being sarcastic.

I was.

Oh man. Well, that was embarrassing.

1) Glad you're charging because it makes me feel like you'll be around.

2) I'm trying to sync 1 file and it's taking over 20 minutes (so far)

3) It'd be nice to allow one-way sync. I don't want to flood my MB Air's tiny drive with every photo I sent to Flickr, but I would want to upload all of my Air's photos.

Please direct support requests to martin@socialfolders.me

I'll take a look at your account to see what went wrong - send me your email.

Agreed on the 1-way sync. Good idea!

This is awesome! Thanks for providing this service - there are loads of nice pictures on Facebook that I've been meaning to make a backup of for ages, now there's a tool that lets me do that without any fuss.

Export/Backup for your Social Networks - great idea.

Can I get more than just photos (files)? Can I save my data or will that get you banned from a few of the providers you integrate with!

I use Backupify for this 'anti-Cloud' type service - it backs up my Gmail. Since I use more than one PC, I'd like to see this do similar to Dropbox - sync local, in the Cloud, and be accessible through clients on any device. I suppose I could do that by putting the SocialFolders into Dropbox - but I'm not sure I want to pay on the double then.

This is one of those ideas that you see and go 'wasn't this done already?' But in fact it wasn't!

Love the idea and the intro. Instant User!

Tons of questions about the syncing features with different services etc.

Shoot your questions! Here or martin@socialfolders.me

If I have the same 100MB file set on multiple social sites through SocialFolders, does that mean I have the set on my local hard drive multiple times as well?

Looks really good. First thought - you need some sort of feedback to let the user know that their files are downloading - I've linked my Facebook account and it's downloading hundreds of photos, but I thought it was broken as it just created a bunch of empty folders. The only way I could confirm that it is working was by checking my used quota. I'm using OSX Lion by the way...

Agreed. We're working on a better menu bar icon. Will have small blue rotating arrows :)

Nice :)

How can you compare it to Locker [1] ?

[1] https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker

Mainly, we're file-based and we mirror all file mgmt operations on your computer. So you always have your content with you. And any offline edits (to your SocialFolders Google Docs for example) is applied online as soon as you reconnect.

And we have a business model.

Thanks! I didn't know this project and looks pretty awesome :)

Nice idea and beautifully implemented, you just gained a new user. The "moving between services" is the real killer feature, imo.

Great idea and beautiful execution. I just copy/pasted a few photos from Instagram to Facebook. I will definitely use this.

Very nice idea and so far the service looks pretty good. Congratulations :) I did find it a little hard to find the different pricing levels/what I get for them. I think having a page dedicated to the different account types (free, premium, etc) linked off the main menu would be good.

This looks like a great frontend for FUSE (or MacFUSE by Google, http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). I think you guys nailed the user experience because FUSE can be really difficult to setup for n00bs.

I'd totally forgotten about that project, used to use it with MacFusion. We'll check out the project again to see which of the services we could integrate (or what code/libs we could use).

So what happens when I copy my SocialFolder into my Dropbox folder? Does the universe implode? :D

This is a really nice idea, well done! I'm going to try this out for a few days but I fully expect to but an annual premium account. I'd quite like it if i could turn off the menubar icon in OS X though.

The taskbar menu shows how much I've used of my quota, but what would be very useful would be the dropbox-esque bit of info that tells me how much of it has actually sync'd.

This has serious legs, martin. Well done :) A similar idea has been in my "would-be-nice" list for eons, but its amazing to see it actually work.

Wishing you great success! Happy hacking !

Great idea. http://socialfolders.me/download-pc/ screenshots looks crappy.

Great idea, however If I want to share a set of photos on multiple services, I have to waste a lot of space !? will symlink works?

Yep - for now

We are evaluating the feasability of using symlinks (the problem being cross-platform execution).

I like it.

It did however take me till the last 30 seconds of the video to actually get how this would be useful to me.

Need to play with it to get you more feedback.

I agree. I thought it looked neat until the last 30 seconds, once I saw the drag and drop uploads I needed to have it.

the last minute or so is brilliant. shows how easy it is. its actually quite painful sometimes to upload pics to various online albums. one easy solution would be good. I actually thought that dropbox would be doing something like this in the future.

If I modify a file locally, does that get mirrored elsewhere?

Also, I assume that such modifications aren't propagated to the other copies?

Yes & you assume correctly.

The "remember me" option on the login doesn't seem to work. Not a big deal, but just pointing it out :-)

Sweet video! I would suggest adding a clickable link on your youtube video description.

I am the only one that gets a time-out when trying to download the app?

Shouldn't be any problems the file is hosted on S3… Weird. Can you try again and shoot me an email at martin@socialfolders.me if it still doesn't work?

great idea, so great that i'm helping to spread on facebook... Still has field to find a way to keep just one file to all social networks, but maybe it will make the end user confused...

I can find so much use from this. Great job!

Lovely demo video. Who made that for you?

The screencast parts are home-made, Screenflow FTW.

The first 30" were made by a freelance on Elance.

lol serious hustle! Love this execution!!

LOL! Here we go again. Now I can't even comment to praise somebody. Flame away guys :)

How much did that freelancer cost (approx.)?

Also, "Hero + 3 below" just works, I suggest changing the front page to that layout for greater impact.

$800

His original video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ZgtOZJVKE

Edit: sorry, didn't get the part about the "Hero + 3 below". Care to explain?

Grid design system. Hero (one big unit in middle of the screen) +3 (3 smaller units just below).

I tried to find a quick example with blank content, but this is the best I can pull at short notice: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/hero.html

Question: Are you guys funded? Looking for funding? and do you store the data serverside in addition to the users device?

Got it, thanks!

Answer: no - yes - no

Isn't it really just fashionable at the moment? Saying 'it just works' is a bit like saying 'Hush Puppies will always be cool' in the 90s.

I'm already getting tired of bootstrap sites to be honest. I think it's going to end up backfiring on twitter in that their design will look very generic and boring because everyone's using bootstrap.

It's nice, but it doesn't quite "mirror all the content I have" because it doesn't transfer comments. I claim ownership of all comments left by me, and by others, on my content. When a social network deletes a picture of mine, all the comments are lost, as well. This breaks the conversation, and cannot be fixed by simply re-uploading the original content. I understand that you cannot transfer comments from one social network to another, but the basic problem remains. Solve that, and you've got a real winner.

Sorry - this is so last century. We are heading Into the Cloud, not into "get my social content to my PC" era...

You are wrong. Some people still want their (private) data in one place - on the harddrive.

I had 3 hard-drives fail on my home computers, in the last month alone. Are you sure that's where you want your private data to be?

Yeah I mean you are sooo right, look at Photo Stream! I mean, Photo Stream is SO last century. Hmmm.

Afraid so - I love Apple devices, but Photo Stream is completely unusable to me. Why should I take up all that precious mobile device space with many copies of my Photos - of which I have thousands to begin with? If you have 10 photos and clueless about how to upload them - perhaps it's something that would be neat for you...

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