

How Not To Run Customer Service: 2 months of downtime on file a storage site - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/11/mediamax-deletes-your-files-creates-a-social-network-based-on-storage/

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lux
Ouch, that sucks for those users...

Jason sneered at the idea of social networking based around storage, but
that's actually not a bad idea. Storage itself is boring, but it's the basis
of any service really. So if you add more than storing, say like sharing,
publishing, and file manipulation (image editing, or Writely perhaps), then
you have something particularly useful in a social context.

For example, say you put a bunch of images up on your storage site and now
you'd like to publish them as a gallery for your family. Wouldn't it be nice
to just select them all and click a "Publish to gallery" button?

Not to toot my own horn, but a previous site of mine did exactly this and
about 10,000 users seemed to really like it at the time (I had to shut it down
though for various reasons, including being a solo founder and trying to run
two company at the same time).

I imagine the future of something like that could be in integrating the
various components out there already now like S3 + Google Docs + publishing to
various social sites. It just seems disjointed that I have to go to separate
websites to access my photos, my calendar, my documents, my friends, etc. and
that none of them really work together yet...

