Yup I highly encourage anyone interested in the back-story to give the above blog post a read. It is an overview of our last year (from inception till now).
Fantastic story, and I was initially excited for, and promoting Zapier. But then a simple request for single folder Dropbox access, seemed to fall on deaf ears.
I don't have a personal agenda other than good citizenship and concern for best practices that affect the community.
If you're dumping a file to my Dropbox, why do you need full read access to all folders?
If you adding a note to Evernote, why do you need full r/w access to my entire note store?
etcetc
The simple answer is often it's not needed. For example, Wappwolf gets it right in this case (http://i.imgur.com/Ug5Fi.png), by allowing the freedom to choose.
Sure it's simply easier and less hassle for a startup to deal with things like users privacy concerns.
However, if anything, it's an opportunity for you guys to be leading and setting the example in restricted, 'only what you require', SaaS security model.
This idea of giving exponentially more startups, complete access to your increasingly critical online services, does not seem wise at all.
Apologies for a bit of a rant, just rather passionate about this issue, and hope you guys will take it seriously :)
More nuanced scope settings are definitely something we'd like to do. Put simply, we just haven't had a chance to get to it quite yet, but we're definitely hearing more requests for it and we want to honor those requests. We're working on it!
Actually wasn't concerned with timelines, but rather a principle statement of agreement or disagreement. Of course there are pragmatic issues, but also its very easy for startups in public diplomatic relations to say "yup sure" and have little interest in following through. (not saying that is necessarily the case here of course)
Hence why I was raising the question at the principle level, rather than a specific feature level to be slotted in with all the other todo's.
Like I said before.. I have personally nothing to gain from this implementation. But if it takes more users to request it then so be it for you to notice then so be it. I will continue to raise awareness of the greater issue here. (Beyond Zapier as well)
We have so many apps and requests every single day we have to prioritize what people are willing to pay for first. Wappwolf does have better permissions here (which we'd also like to support) but they don't have 117 apps to support alongside it. Startups are not asking for this stuff maliciously -- there are only so many hours in the day and we have to prioritize.
To be honest this comes across a little defensive and a bit elitist.
It is irrelevant if someone is paying customer or not, as you have no idea how much future business they will do with your company, or what blogger or friend of the press she or he talks to at social gathering etc etc.
A simple "Yup you're right privacy is important. Thanks for the headsup, we are gonna work on it!" would be a more effective response (assuming it's true).
Or if that's not true then:
"Well, we not sure if it's important but lets see if more users request it and if they pay us, then will probably look into it! :)"
Zapier is great, I use them to integrate DropBox with HipChat, and it was no trouble at all to set up. And that's what I'm looking for in a product, solves a problem, no trouble to set up. One of the founders was also happy to chat with me about the DropBox integration, which is nice - sign of good customer service to come.
I also integrate GitHub with HipChat, but don't need Zapier for that. Anyone else do any integrations with HipChat they find useful?
Hey Andrew, we have a few things we do with HipChat (or Highrise or whatever), I'll list my favorites from usefulness to "just for fun":
* churns in Stripe trigger a message in the chat room, we always try to
follow up immediately and figure out why
* specific support requests or emails also trigger in the chat room
* Google alert RSS feeds for Zapier also dump mentions of Zapier across
the web into the chat room
* we have another chat account called the ZapBot. he's a bit foul mouthed,
but anyone can control him through a Gtalk->HipChat zap we set up.
So happy for these guys! Wade and his team are a great bunch who have a passion for helping business owners streamline their processes. Excited to see them continue to grow.
