
Frenzy - The Dropbox powered social network - sant0sk1
http://frenzyapp.com/
======
mitko
"Requires OS X 10.5+ Intel"

Unless you make it run everywhere Dropbox runs this is gonna be "The Dropbox +
Mac powered social network".

I'd like to try it and give some more constructive feedback but I'm running
Ubuntu.

~~~
johnw
That's an awkward one. Much as it would be nice to be on other platforms, I
really want to build an app that I want to use daily and has a great user
experience. I wouldn't be so keen on building for a platform I don't use. The
JSON feed format is pretty basic, so maybe someone else could provide a Linux
client with similar features.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Wouldn't alternative implementations be at odds with your stated monetization
plan? I mean, it'd make sense if you were running the platform, but isn't this
just a bunch of JSON files in a shared Dropbox folder?

~~~
johnw
I don't mind others using the idea and feed format for their apps on other
platforms. That shouldn't affect my ability to sell the Mac version.

~~~
quinndupont
I'm glad to hear it. I'm totally cool with throwing you a few bucks (may I
recommend the Pinboard.in model?)

------
gilesc
It's a great idea technically, but I'm not sure whether you can sell a social
networking app. Social networks are valuable in proportion to the number of
users, and pay-for-access adds a huge barrier to growth.

They might be better off running some unobtrusive ads.

~~~
sedachv
"Social networks are valuable in proportion to the number of users"

Only for advertisers.

~~~
mapleoin
For users as well. If you're the only one using a social networking in your
circle of friends, then it's not going to be very useful.

------
macrael
Fascinating. Dropbox is e first really popular "filesystem in the cloud" so it
stands to reason that we are going to start to see services built on top of
it. Rally, it is a piece of the old "everyone will have a server" dream.
Except, instead of having to define as new protocol for evry service, you just
use JSON over http. There is a lot of potential here, much can be made of a
publicly available everywhere filesystme.

~~~
thwarted
_Except, instead of having to define as new protocol for evry service, you
just use JSON over http._

Why do people keep saying things like this? These are protocols, but they are
at different levels. HTTP is the transport protocol, JSON is the serialization
protocol, but you'd still need to define a protocol to communicate the
content. What will the fields be named? How do you handle missing fields,
which are the required ones? Will all data sources that list photos agree to
naming the fields the same? And what about field metadata, and metadata for
the field metadata? Maybe that can be avoided with namespacing. Now we have
something as crappy as XML.

~~~
true_religion
The frustration of XML can be divided into two parts:

1\. The frustrating infrastructure build around it, such as SOAP which is
anything but _simple_

2\. The verbosity of the protocol itself which frustrates human readability
which _supposedly_ is a key feature of XML

If we use JSON and avoid the infrastructure mistakes of XML (e.g. requiring
huge amounts of boilerplate for RPC calls), then I think the native
_readability_ of JSON makes it a far better choice for serialization protocol
than XML.

~~~
thwarted
Yeah, that's great, but my point was that HTTP+JSON solves the easiest part,
not the part that actually needs to be done: creating an agreed upon format
for the content being serialized (via JSON) and transported (via HTTP). When
that was attempted with XML, it ended up with multiple query methods, multiple
schemas, new and obscure transport wrappers (SOAP over SMTP, for example).

Maybe we can avoid a Second System Effect now going forward... if XML was the
Second System.

------
ch0wn
Amazing! Rian Hunter from Dropbox mentioned his vision about apps in this
style in his talk at PyCon, that is very interesting in general:
<http://pycon.blip.tv/file/4878722/>

~~~
johnw
Thanks for linking that. I had not seen it. It scares me how smart the Dropbox
guys are.

------
hucker
Great idea! A few things that bothered me though:

1\. Once someone has replied to your message you can't delete the
conversation. If you could perhaps implement a "request delete" or something,
so that if everyone agrees you can delete a conversation tree? Right now my
"feed" is cluttered with lots of test convos. Another solution might be having
a separate .json file for every user?

2\. It wasn't obvious to me how you shared files. The "Set hotkey" option in
the preferences should maybe be renamed to "Set file share hotkey" or
something, at least explain a bit better without having to go the FAQ.

Other than that, looks good for a beta! I got a really strong "why didn't I
think of that" feeling when I first tried it :)

~~~
johnw
Frenzy author here.

If you were the last person to reply in a conversation you can delete your own
reply by holding down the option key. The reply button will then change to a
delete button. There is still currently no way to delete an entire
conversation though.

I was possibly thinking of adding the ability to archive items you've seen
already so they don't show again.

Regarding point 2 - thanks, good thinking. I will definitely need to make this
clearer as many are still confused as to how to actually share things. Most
try and drag files into the message text field or onto the menu item which is
not yet supported.

I'm glad you like it :)

~~~
mitjak
To add to the bug report thread, there is no way to get out of the very first
dialogue the app presents (choose shared folder to use). If I don't select
anything, I can't close the app in any way except for using Activity Monitor.

~~~
johnw
Thanks. You're the second person to report this. I will fix it next version.

------
davidedicillo
I honestly would try to push this as a collaboration network for small biz. I
can totally see myself using it for that.

------
rushabh
Looks like a neat concept. It seems dropbox is fast becoming a platform. The
other day, I was suggesting someone that they use quickbooks over dropbox for
using it on multiple locations. I figured it does not work very easily, but
the whole idea of using dropbox as a platform was kind of interesting.

~~~
mayank
We are starting to use it to synchronize a photo identification database for
wildlife conservation workers in Kenya:
<http://code.google.com/p/stripespotter>

It becomes a lot easier if you design your application with Dropbox
integration in mind (use plain text where possible, etc.)

~~~
semanticist
Oops, sorry, accidentally down voted this.

------
naithemilkman
Am I the only guy who doesn't get it? What's the value add here? What problem
is being solved?

------
sbarre
This is a great idea, but it needs a better friend/contact discovery method

~~~
johnw
Agreed. It would be much nicer if you could just put your friends email in and
it would handle setting up a shared folder and inviting your friend
automatically. I have yet to see whether the Dropbox API will support this.

------
bartman
I'd love to have this [1] view for the recently changed files list of the
Dropbox app, it's so much cleaner.

[1] <http://frenzyapp.com/images/panel1.jpg>

------
insight
awesome. so long Diaspora finally a fully distributed online/offline platform
is easily available to everyone. Man, Dropbox is the new Internet pipe.

------
antidaily
Reminds me of Pownce. Sorta.

~~~
quinndupont
Ouch, but yes, indeed.

------
amadamala
Nice idea, and UI seems very simple to use.

------
jackowayed
Why can't you support chrome?

~~~
johnw
Chrome is fully supported. It's just not one of the icons shown on the launch
screen, which I am now deeply regretting.

