

Share your stuff with a link - hawke
http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=1138

======
rkudeshi
Being able to link to a folder is a godsend. I hated having to share a folder
(editable) when I needed to send someone many files.

However, does this now deprecate the Public folder? I thought that was one of
Dropbox's best features: knowing only things in the Public folder were
publicly-accessible (with a link)—and more importantly, that files located
anywhere else were completely private and NOT web-accessible at all—was easy
to grok and explain.

I worry that as Dropbox moves toward its stated goal of becoming the "file
system for the Internet" that they will give up the focus on syncing our
private files in exchange for the allure of allowing every site and app to
read and write from one's Dropbox. That's a worrisome future, indeed.

~~~
chimeracoder
I agree. I actually read your comment an hour ago, thought nothing of it, then
just now tried to send a file to someone, and realized immediately how
important this is.

What would be really great is to have an easy view for all files that are not
private (or all files that are link-shared, etc., since there are three tiers
of privacy in the Dropbox world). On the web interface, this would be easy,
but I do most of my work on the command-line, so it seems the easiest way for
them (or anyone) to implement this would be through links.

However, I know that Dropbox has had (still has?) issues with treating
symlinks properly, so I'm very hesitant to write a script to handle this
myself.

As it stands, though, I'm very concerned about this. I've used Dropbox for
years, and I've accumulated so many files and folders there - I could do some
spring cleaning, but most of it is actually stuff that I want to be able to
access remotely. Right now, I know that everything is private, except for the
shared folders, which I always name "shared_ _" by convention. Pretty soon,
that won't be the case, and not having a clear system for this makes me_
really* uneasy, because I know that human error is the number one cause of
security/privacy breaches.

~~~
asmosoinio
Wonder why this reply is dead?

\---

ivankirigin 19 minutes ago | link [dead] You can view all the links you've
made here: <http://dropbox.com/links> Also, when something is linked, there is
a link icon on the right side of the file browser on <http://dropbox.com/home>

~~~
ivankirigin
I posted the comment twice because the parent was posted twice.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3879016>

My guess is a bot killed it thinking the duplicate post was spam. No big deal

------
Schlaefer
Good idea poorly executed. Serving a html page but having a media file
extension at the end is a bad idea.

For example <https://www.dropbox.com/s/yq9fyyh794qvghv/IMG_0146.JPG>. You
can't embed it in an img-tag. Other software which tries to embed or handle it
as an image fails. Even worse: non-tech people you're trying to help here have
no idea why: "But it's a .jpg!".

Dropbox just put a layer between me and the data and there's no easy way
around it.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
The extension thing is a valid critique; but the "layer" as you call it is
just a main part of their business; remember, they are in the file sharing
business and _not_ in the file hosting/CDN business.

------
huhtenberg
Feeling a pressure from Cubby I take.

Sharing anything with a link has always been LogMeIn's thing, and their
Dropbox clone (called Cubby and released into beta last week) also has it. But
you know what else LogMeIn's stuff has that Dropbox doesn't? Client-side
encryption. I wish Dropbox reacted to _that_.

[0] <http://b.logme.in/2012/04/18/introducing-cubby/>

------
sauerbraten
This feature was there before, you could enable it for your account by
visiting <https://dropbox.com/enable_shmodel>. This gave you the context menu
in the desktop software as well as the buttons in the webview. Also, you could
create links to anything you wanted already in the Android app.

~~~
Dexec
Yeah I was just about to say this, I thought it would have been common
knowledge (at least for HN folk).

------
qeorge
Might be asking to much, but is it possible to get a direct link to the file?

Otherwise programs like HipChat are unable to auto-embed the photo, because
its HTML dressed as an image. For example:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/caha7e5v0js24mj/dropbox-hipchat-
em...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/caha7e5v0js24mj/dropbox-hipchat-embed.png)

I'd be happy to add a query string manually, i.e.,
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/caha7e5v0js24mj/dropbox-hipchat-
em...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/caha7e5v0js24mj/dropbox-hipchat-
embed.png?img)

Imgur.com does a good job with this.

~~~
xxbondsxx
Dropbox has pretty harsh bandwidth limits for files that are hosted publicly,
mainly to avoid becoming a cheap & lazy webserver for everyone to use. They
additionally have the difficulty that the photo could change at any moment --
so photo URLs from their CDN have all this complicated versioning:

[https://photos-1.dropbox.com/pi/2048x1536/UoBdS4hHgypeXF5Ge8...](https://photos-1.dropbox.com/pi/2048x1536/UoBdS4hHgypeXF5Ge8K-qTJC2aSdY1wD8jeCaTgYI3I/3717712/1335286800/eb87d20/dropbox-
hipchat-embed-smaller.png)

I guess my point is that it would be great, but you can have imgur or Dropbox
-- not both.

------
ed209
I was recently speculating that Dropbox is the new Facebook
[https://plus.google.com/109940267018696224506/posts/HPzzXpZh...](https://plus.google.com/109940267018696224506/posts/HPzzXpZhkWU)

~~~
unalone
Interesting that people are doing this, but most people use Facebook for
storage/sharing second, for social/commenting first. It's not about the
photos, it's about the comments attached to the photos. And about the status
updates and wall posts and all the other communicative stuff.

Email doesn't handle that, because email doesn't let interested observers chip
in. One-to-one has its drawbacks.

~~~
ed209
that's true, I guess it would only take Dropbox to add commenting on the
sharing pages they now create. But it's mostly about the perms for me (which
these shared pages don't seem to offer), I know who I share a DB folder with.
And in my particular case, the comments happen over the phone, or when my
family comes over, on skype and actually some to/fro email (although it's
annoying when it happens there).

~~~
unalone
A comments page but also a newsfeed to track the comments happening.

It's a bit catchword-y, but I like the phrase "ambient social" to describe the
appeal of Facebook in one key sense: it's not about directed conversations,
it's about creating opportunities for conversations which other people might
take you up on. I post a status not because I want to talk about myself, but
because I'm sending out a feeler for if anybody else wants to begin a
conversation. (Which is why Twitter doesn't appeal to me the same way: it's
nowhere near as easy to track conversations.)

------
joejohnson
I have symlink in my dropbox folder to a few other directories on my harddrive
(like pointers to My Documents, etc.) This is super useful, because I can view
pretty much any small file on my computer via Dropbox.

However, this linking doesn't work well in OS X via Finder. Even though any
file in My Documents is in my Dropbox, the Dropbox client doesn't detect this,
and I don't have the option in the right-click menu to view the link for these
files.

------
calydon
I think the consensus is this isn't really a new feature (around since at
least 06/2010), just extended to include files in any folder, not just the
'public' folder.

~~~
rkudeshi
Well, I don't think they ever allowed you to link publicly to an entire
folder, so that's pretty new.

~~~
dybber
You have been able to do it in a couple of months by using <http://views.fm>

------
headbiznatch
Minus has been doing this for awhile. It's incredibly handy to be able to
share something with someone instantly and without a need to create an
account. <http://minus.com/>

------
dybber
Photo and video galleries, but no music player? Seems like they are a bit
scared.

~~~
rabidonrails
what stops you from posting a tv show or movie?

~~~
_delirium
Nothing, really, but within the free space tier you can fit a ton of music but
only relatively little video, so it may be less of an issue.

------
bizodo
Box has had this for a while and I have also been using ge.tt to do this. Nice
to do it from desktop tho.

------
beothorn
When I saw the title on my feed I tought the article would be about the python
simple http server. One of the most useful commands that I've ever learned:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

------
Apocryphon
Sounds like a shot across YouSendIt's bow.

