
Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total) - davecardwell
https://www.dropbox.com/free
======
ivankirigin
I work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding
variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News.

A few points that might interest yall:

1\. We won't publish to facebook or twitter without your explicit permission.

2\. We ask for information about your facebook profile because it will make
Dropbox better. It's mainly about learning about our users without annoying
surveys. We won't mandate facebook connect on signup so this is likely going
to be the main path in the near term for people to facebook connect. Facebook
auth also makes it really easy to post to facebook when you want to; the user
experience is better.

3\. Yes, runjake is right. Please do subscribe if you love Dropbox. I work
here, so I set my capacity to 5TB and symlink everything important on my
system (Desktop, Documents, etc) to Dropbox. The experience of coming to a
home computer and having the stuff I was working on just appear is nothing
less than magical. This is enabled by having more than a few gigs of storage.

4\. If you want terabytes of storage, come work here. It is the best tech
company in the valley: <http://www.dropbox.com/jobs>

Ask me anything.

~~~
DannoHung
Can I just pay for Terabytes of storage? No offense, but I like the job I
have.

~~~
ivankirigin
If you don't want a job, we also accept payment in the form of first borns and
souls.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of work to do on different pricing
plans.

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runjake
Here's a more simple task I was able to perform for 50GB of space:

1.) Sign up for a $9 50GB membership.

2.) Go through their wizard to set up a recurring $9 Paypal payment.

3.) There is no step 3.

Time spent: 3 minutes

Karma spent: You support a great company that doesn't screw you over.

~~~
sliverstorm
Very true. I only wish they had some smaller price steps; I can't commit to
$10/mo. I'd love to give them money if I could buy, say, 25GB for $5 or 10 for
$2.50

~~~
phjohnst
I totally agree. I'm sure that it would screw with their pricing, but I really
just dont need 50GB, and can get by with the 3GB that I have now. Sure I'd
like a little more (and frankly, would happily pay $5/mo for what I have now),
but I just dont have enough stuff that I'd like to sync to fill up that $10/mo
bucket. They did used to have some smaller plans, so they must have got rid of
them for a good reason.

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treblig
I trust Dropbox immensely. I clicked all of those buttons without really
reading the specifics.

1\. I trust that they're not doing anything scummy or underhanded. My life's
on Dropbox, and they're not going to do anything to reduce that level of
trust.

2\. If I ended up accidentally Tweeting that I love Dropbox, that wouldn't be
the worst thing in the world.

This said, the messaging was very clear, and everything behaved as expected.
Great work as usual, guys.

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morisy
_Tell us why you love Dropbox_ = 128 MB.

And to think of all the time and wasted energy we spent early on trying to get
user feedback. Incentives are a wonderful thing!

~~~
ivankirigin
It has been fun to watch this page:
<http://twitter.com/#!/search/i%20love%20dropbox>

~~~
AdamTReineke
I noticed early Monday that lots of my friends were sharing their love for
Dropbox on Twitter. Initially, I figured it was just impromptu declarations of
love for the service. It wasn't until later that I discovered this page.

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gst
I love Dropbox from a usability point of view, but unfortunately the missing
encryption is the main reason why it's not an option for me right now. I'd
like to also be able to backup sensitive data, but I don't trust the Dropbox
employees with access to my data.

Instead, I'm currently using Wuala which encrypts the data diretly on the
client. An alternative to Wuala seems to be SpiderOak, which also features
client side encryption (but I didn't try this one yet).

~~~
zcid
I just store a TrueCrypt container on my Dropbox. It's a little clunky if you
need to dismount/mount it a lot, but if your system is on 24/7 then it isn't
really noticeable.

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jackowayed
The brilliant thing about all of the free space that Dropbox "gives away" is
that most people who get it (90%? more?) don't actually use it.

I'm up to 4.9GB of free space, but I'm only using 7.6%, so I'm well under 2GB.
And I would venture to guess that I'musing more space than the average free
user.

So their cost isn't even the pretty-low cost of (cost to store 128MB * the
number of people who do the task). It's the tiny cost of (cost to store 128MB
* the number of people who do the task * percentage of those people that
actually use the space).

~~~
gst
Even less space is required. Dropbox stores duplicate files only once. So if
many users store the same files the cost per user is practically zero.

That's also the reason why uploads are so fast. If a file is already on the
server it isn't uploaded again.

~~~
almost
Is it really shared between accounts? So for example if I knew someone with
Dropbox had a file that could have one of several contents and I wanted to
know which of those contents they had I could try uploading the different
versions and see which one uploaded faster?

A little far fetched maybe, but I'm sure there's a way to exploit something
somewhere using that....

~~~
gst
Yes - this should work.

There are even other ways how you might be able to exploit this. I don't
exactly know how Dropbox verifies if your file is already on the server. But
if they only check a hash of the file it might be sufficient to know the hash
of any file stored on Dropbox to gain access to the full file.

Of course, this is just a speculation and there might be more security
precautions in place. Such as, e.g., sending the client various challenges
about the hashes of particular byte ranges.

In addition, also the copyright implications of this are interesting. Consider
that you've shared a directory with your friends and that you upload some
copyrighted movie (that is already on their servers and not really uploaded).
Are you then the one liable for the damages (if sued), or is the original
(first) uploader of the file liable?

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stevelosh
So what does "Connect your Twitter account to Dropbox" actually mean?

They're asking for read/write permission, which makes me wonder if it's going
to post every time I change a file or something. No thanks.

~~~
zavulon
Yeah, I'm sorry but I'm not clicking "Connect your Twitter account" without
telling me EXACTLY what will happen afterwards.

~~~
user24
so you're happy to share your personal files with dropbox, but not your
twitter account? Odd priorities. Not saying they're wrong priorities, but just
not what I'd expect.

~~~
sesqu
It's a lot harder to automate abuse of a random person's semistructured data
without metadata than it is to automate abuse of a random person's twitter
account. Sure, it's also more lucrative, but I wouldn't worry about it for a
couple more years.

~~~
user24
I don't really know what you mean.

You're right. But I don't see how that's relevant. My point was that people
have a choice "I trust dropbox not to abuse my personal files" and they draw
the line at their _twitter account_?!? This I find odd. I don't see how your
comment makes it less odd.

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rafamvc
I'm sorry, your settings for facebook are WAY over the top! Common, you want
to be able to access my data anytime? What are you guys planning to do?
Explain why you are asking for this. A lot of people did, I'm sure, but this
is way fishy for me. I do trust dropbox (and I'm a paid user, so you have my
credit card) but it is a request for access for something you do not use.

Why? Please explain!

~~~
ivankirigin
We figured there wasn't much reason to restrict what we ask for. I'd like to
verify that with data and run a test.

Everything we asked for has a hypothetical future purpose or a present value
as an implicit user survey. We could, for example, make the photos upload
experience to facebook much better. That requires posting photos and also
reading photos to understand how much our users might care about the feature.

We could just ask for that access later, but this is easier. Users are getting
something in exchange, so for most I'd bet it is a fair trade: capacity boost
for data.

------
eps
Is this a marketing trick of some sort? I'm getting a login form and that's
it.

~~~
davecardwell
Ah, sorry—that’s my fault. I didn’t check if you could access the page when
not logged in.

Basically they offer a number of options to get some extra free space for
their service. Giving them some feedback, linking your Twitter and/or Facebook
accounts, and posting about why you “love Dropbox” on your Twitter / Facebook
account once authorised.

------
davecardwell
I thought this was a clever way of incentivising people to authorise Dropbox
to access their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I don’t suppose I would normally have posted to my Facebook wall about
Dropbox, nor my Twitter account, but now I have.

Presumably the cost to Dropbox is quite minimal (768MB extra free space in
total). It’s made me think about ways in which we could offer similar
incentives at $dayjob.

~~~
ivankirigin
Many people post to facebook & twitter from here:
<https://www.dropbox.com/referrals>

Comparing these two pages is really interesting in the different prompts to
post and the different results. We'll integrate the two pages more deeply
soon.

------
pstinnett
Not sure the exact mechanics behind it, but it's pretty awesome to see the
growl notification of my space being increased almost immediately after
clicking the authorization buttons on this page. Just fits right in with
Dropbox being an incredible service.

------
marknutter
"I love Dropbox because I'm getting 128MB of space added to my account if I
say this."

------
jrnkntl
Authorized, followed @dropbox, told them why I loved it, posted about it & de-
authorized Twitter, easiest 512mb I made under 30 seconds.

Sidenote to Dropbox: Buy a SSL certificate that supports dropbox.com without
the www.

------
nkassis
256mb for logging on to facebook? PFFFT that's 5Gb minimum. I'm 2 months
without login in to Facebook now and this isn't enough to kill my downtime.

Increase the incentive ;p

------
DenisM
I just received an email from someone I barely knew, to use Dropbox. He had no
business sending me this email, and by sending it on his behalf you put
yourself and him in this situation where both of you engage in sending SPAM.

I stopped short of clicking the "report spam" button, but it cost you some
amount of goodwill, so you lose either way. I will be a lot less likely now to
genuinely recommend your app to my friends.

------
kingkilr
Going to be another person to chime in to say Dropbox is awesome. I use it for
passing podcast recordings back and forth with my cohost (while we're
editing), as well as hosting and backing up arbitrary photos, HTML, and
presentations. I still have plenty of free space (thanks to awesome stuff like
this, and the 2x referrals for students), but when I hit my cap I'll have no
qualms about paying.

------
dstein
If anything, Dropbox isn't thinking big enough. They really need to start
thinking about how to provide a ubiquitous, multi-platform, private, cloud
filesystem. Stop encouraging people to "back up" their files, and start using
encouraging people to store the primary copy of all their files on Dropbox.

On Windows, Dropbox shows up as "My Documents/My Dropbox". When really "My
Documents" should be the dropbox.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
Having the option to set your "My Documents" folder to be your DropBox folder
(without resorting to symlinks or toher trickery) might be a cool option to
have, but IMHO defaulting to sharing your "My Documents" folder would be
_highly_ intrusive and rather evil. Very un-dropbox like.

One of the things I love about Dropbox is that they've always seemed to be
very straight forward and above board. They _feel_ trustable.

------
brown9-2
Can someone who knows more about Facebook apps and their API than I do tell me
what a company would want with permission to "Access my data any time" and
"Access my photos and videos"?

~~~
mbthomas
Specifically regarding "Access my data any time" -- Facebook normally issues
applications short-lived "access tokens" when someone uses Facebook Connect.
The idea that that application can then access the data that you give it
permission to during your session with that application.

The "Access my data any time" permission gives the application a long-lasting
(nearly indefinite) "access token" that the application can store and user to
interact with your Facebook account at a later time.

------
simonista
Maybe it was just me, but I totally didn't "get it" at first that these were
sort of steps that build on each other and should be done in order.

So it seemed really strange to me that I had to connect my twitter account
before I could follow @dropbox, and the error message you get when you click
on the follow one before the auth one is not very descriptive.

Otherwise, really cool offer, thanks guys.

~~~
ivankirigin
That is actually an error. Clicking follow should do the twitter auth and give
you both bonuses. Thanks for pointing it out.

------
fharper1961
Maybe it would be better if you could change the message before
tweeting/posting to FB. I wrote something to DB that I didn't want to tweet.
So I didn't do the last 2 steps, which were presumably the most important
ones. I realize that not being able to change the message, is to try and
ensure that the tweet is really about loving Dropbox.

~~~
ivankirigin
You can edit the message by clicking on the little pen icon next to the text.

------
loyaltyspace
The feature I need most. From the IPhone app, I would like to be able to
select a file and email the file to myself or someone else - not the link to
the file. Dropbox is blocked at work but sometimes I really need to get an
important file from there. I'm a paying susbcriber. Keep up the good work!

------
cjoh
Seems to me that Dropbox will have a pretty good asset here a la rapleaf. If
they get enough people to voluntarily give them their twitter and facebook
IDs, Dropbox will have a very accurate lookup service of
email|facebook|twitter -- that's something a lot of companies are after these
days.

~~~
ivankirigin
Dropbox won't sell user data.

~~~
dedward
Currently.

------
Luc
After authorizing with Twitter, I got redirected to an error page on the
Dropbox site (Error (5xx)).

------
daniel_iversen
A good test of a product is how many people are willing to give you a positive
review to their friends/family/colleagutes/etc

Keep up the good work Dropbox, you ROCK!!

PS: Who could have thought that so much innovation could happen with something
so seemingly small (an "online disk drive")

------
davis_m
This let me get rid of that dangling 256MB that had been lingering since I
opened the account and got the first free 256MB. That has been bothering my
OCD. Now I have an even 12GB.

------
avner
I love dropbox but giving it complete access to my facebook besides all my
files is pretty much handing my "social life" and my "work life" to a single
company.

~~~
gst
Try Wuala or SpiderOak if you want a similar service that features client-side
encryption (so the company offering the service can't read your data).

------
evanmoran
Any word on supporting encryption? It seems like aside from partial sync it is
the only big thing you guys are missing...

------
brianobush
You guys at Dropbox rock at neat marketing gimmicks that make your users feel
good about promoting the product.

------
john2x
I've performed all the tasks, but I don't think I've gotten any extra space.
:(

------
MikeCapone
I did all of them except the two Facebook ones. That was a bit too far for me.

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plainOldText
This is an amazing marketing strategy. Very simple and effective, IMHO.

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dholowiski
That is some insane viral marketing, other companies should take note!

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urza
I wish dropbox was opensource.

I would like to sync via my home server, not cloud.

