

Startup idea: auto-dropboxify all web/url shared documents - mad44

Startup idea: auto-dropboxify all web/url shared documents, so our downloaded local copies are kept up-to-date with the authoritative copy.<p>A week ago, I downloaded a pdf presentation to be able to open it locally. Today, when I reopened my local copy of the pdf, I wondered if the authoritative copy was changed by the author in the meanwhile. Wouldn't it be nice if my local copy got automatically updated (a la dropbox) if this were the case? This shouldn't be too hard to do. The generalization of this idea is basically an application-level virtual-filesystem that is web-scale.
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ktavera
Interesting concept but my concern would be the frequency of synchronization.
Would the service check remote documents (potentially several megs in size)
every minute to see if they have changed? every 5 minutes? every 30 seconds?
Unless there was some kind of pseudo-dropbox component running on the server
where the documents are hosted to alert the service that there is a new
version of a document, this doesn't seem viable. I could be wrong though, what
approach were you thinking for this?

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mad44
Why not pick daily as the frequency to check (application does not necessitate
tight-synchronization anyway). We can have on-demand based synchronization as
a backup/safety net plan. If a user actually opens the local document, the
client-portion of the service will call the server-portion of the service
(which hosts the documents) and that in turn will check if there is a change
in the original/remote document.

If the document is a popular document, it will stay up-to-date with much finer
granularity than a day.

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mad44
This idea may as well be seen as extending CDNs to reach out and embrace the
pc/laptops as the last hop. The client-component of this service may interact
with CDNs, maybe.

