Show HN: SendRail - Easy P2P File Transfer From The Desktop
sendrail.com
sendrail.com
You might want to consider offering a couple of different options; none of these file transfer services have a FB requirement:
http://wetransfer.com http://yousendit.com http://letscrate.com http://ge.tt
Or perhaps you want to position this as a FB-only service? It would certainly differentiate your service, but might also limit your user base unnecessarily.
Limiting user base? I don't think it would hurt much. Half of internet users use Facebook. I think they have a good chance at giving better user experience by tying with Facebook.
Even assuming that figure is true, why cut your potential user base in half right off the bat? And for those who are FB users, what do they do when they want to exchange files with non-FB users? The service will be unusable in such cases even for FB users, and sendrail ends up losing more transactions.
I know that if a third party service wants to tie to Facebook, I immediately say "No thanks".
Same here. I tend to assume that any company so coupled to Facebook probably has the same concern about user privacy as Facebook, i.e. none.
If half of those internet users friends use facebook, this limits Sendrail to 1/4 of potential matches.
If half of those internet users' potential recipients of files are friends (colleagues, acquaintances, chat room contacts, etc may not be fb friends) that gets us to 1/8 of use cases as potentially solved with Sendrail, and Sendrail is only useful to Fb users 1/4 of the time.
Most people won't want to use a service that's useful only 1/4 of the time for a particular task, so this is far worse than a 50% reduction in potential users. This is how you get no users.
Technical question: how are they able to do this? I needed to programmatically send Facebook PMs a while back, and from what I could tell it was not possible. What gives?
On a related note how do you handle firewall piercing?
I don't mean to be snide; I honestly hoped what was going on was that your server was only brokering the transfer, not taking a full upload. In other words, only when the recipient began the file download would sendrail begin uploading the file from my computer. In this scenario, sendrail would merely be reflecting a stream, not storing anything.
So tell me if I understand correctly: If I share a document with someone who DOESN'T have sendrail, they will get the version of the file at the moment I send it. But if I share a document with someone who DOES have sendrail, they will get the version of the file at the moment they download it? In other words - peer to peer downloads get any file changes since the file was sent, but non peer to peer do not?
I guess in the case of a connection to your server, presumably the receiving party would never know that you sent them something (until a retry upload happened).
It's just that in the case of a direct p2p transaction, it's quite likely that the downloading user's downstream bandwidth is low, such that the chance of a failure happening over the entire course of the longer transfer is higher.
No, thank you. Above is a turn off. First of all, the files can't be yours and you can't make people use Facebook to use your service.
I used to use things like Dropbox or other syncing services and then share the link of a file, which is for me an okay solution. But not what makes me really happy.
Your idea looks also interesting, but how do you want to manage things like the file storage time? Do you want to store them permanent? What will become also some interesting challenge is to make the "send file functionality" everywhere in the world fast, regarding up- and downstream.
Really looking forward if other people will find an idea soon. I've been thinking for a while now about it and still never found the kick-ass idea.
I wish you all the best for your product.
Ps: on the bottom of your website is a "-->".
Best, Felix
We at Dropdock ( http:/getdropdock.com/getstarted , check at the end for invite code ) are also working on this problem. We have developed a Cross platform application that send files to anyone, wether they are a dropdock user or online.
Dropdock also work flawlessly over LAN. Our client auto detect other dropdock users on the LAN so you can send them larges files with ease.
We have working on an Android & iOS app too so you can send all those photos and HD video to anyone in one big batch instead of uploading them to different services or sending multiples emails.
We don't want to replace file attachement. If you want to send a simple spreadsheet to someone, you should sent it through email with explanation and not upload it somewhere and C/C the links.
Finally, we though going the facebook route too, but it wasn't too user friendly since you can't auto detect other users base on their facebook account and it just didn't make sens for us to use Facebook messages for notifications.
We are currently in private Beta ( Alpha-ish ) but are about to release a big update with a lot of fixes and new features. If you want to try it out, signup at http://getdropdock.com/signup with the invite code DROPDOCKBETAP1.
I must say that when I've seen a very very similar product completely die as recently as Sendoid did, I get pretty sceptical about the viability of the idea.
http://www.filesovermiles.com/
Can't really see how this could be more convenient to me.
It has a desktop client? (Which is the whole point.)
See https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releases-new-share-appli...
[1] It's actually developed by BitTorrent Inc, the same guys who write µTorrent.