Dispatch launches a discussion layer for Dropbox and Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Dispatch launches a discussion layer for Dropbox and Google Docs

dispatch.io

Watched the presentation live at techcrunch. I like the idea and the enthusiasm of the team but I wonder how compelling a layer on top of these services really is?

Are small startups the target user? I own a small business that uses all of these services. But in the case of dropbox, team members see when files change. Google docs is google docs and file changes are pretty clear. We use lighthouse house for task management and are in constant communication on google talk but we are less than 10 employees.

Does this make more sense for the 30 person company? But at that level I would assume we are investing in a more centralized project and content management platform, box.net?

Hi, I'm Nick, one of the founders. I really appreciate the thoughts on our product. We're focused on smaller teams for now, because we are a small team and are building Dispatch to be the tool we wanted to use. It's not just about being notified when something changes, (which Growl is great for), it's being able to have a discussion with the full context of whatever you're working on. We find that having a central place to facilitate this discussion is really valuable.

We also believe that the integration model, versus wholesale adoption of an entire platform, is what we prefer for our team. We love the products we integrate with for what they do, but we wanted something better than email to keep things organized and focused.

Nick thanks for the response. I think you guys are really sharp. Why not just add a way to migrate organizations off the disparate platforms into your single solution? Perhaps that's the transition into paid?

Wholesale adoption becomes important as a company gets bigger for a lot of reasons, security, centralized accounts, centralized billing.

Thanks :). That's an interesting thought, but right now we're focused on the value we can to these existing services. We have intentionally launched with a core set of features that we believe is the foundation for other things that become useful in this context, like search across integrations and versioning.

I totally agree that the game changes when you're trying to sell large enterprises on adopting something company-wide, but there is a precedent in products like Yammer that start by gaining adoption with small teams and organically grow out. That's the type of model we're interested in exploring.

Great to see more startups evolving in the space of aggregating cloud apps. Lots of the things that Dispatch is doing sound very familiar to what we at Hojoki.com are doing for quite some time now. You might want to check it out, especially as we already got 22 integrations up and running (including Box, GitHub, Lighthouse, Chatter, Yammer, Evernote and many more..).

Add one thing: RSS Support. That is, allow an RSS feed to be used as a source layer. This would help people easily hookup things like Redmine, Github notifications and what not.

That would be cool. Since most services actually expose an API, there are many interesting ideas to explore around the idea of being able to post all different kinds of things to a dispatch, including GH issues or tickets in other issue tracking systems.

So, Box.com?

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