

Filepicker.io (YC S12) lets content flow without worrying about bandwidth - tagx
http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-filepicker-lets-content-flow-without-worrying-about-bandwidth/

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combataircraft
After I signed up to this, I started getting an e-mail everyday. All e-mails
are titled like "Do you need help?" "Let's get you started with filepicker"
etc etc. WTF is this? What is this rush for? I just gave a try your app,
that's it. It sounded useful at first but you are losing respect by spamming.

~~~
liyanchang
Hi there. We think it's super useful too and therefore really excited to help
developers onboard.

We've learned quite a bit about how to email developers and still continuing
to learn to to best serve you all.

For instance, we started out sending html email, like we've seen other
companies do. It wasn't nearly as helpful as personally emailing our new
signups in plain text.

We've also experimented with newsletters like AWS does and targeted emails
based on weekly actives and other metrics. In this, we're finding that the
most effective emails match the relationship. If you are a current user, a
short personal email works well. If you signed up a long time ago, a
newsletter is relatively effective at getting someone to poke at it again, but
also easy for them to ignore.

As you have discovered, we're also playing with frequency. I'd have to look it
up in our db to be sure, but it looks like you happened to be in a small a/b
test group that we've termed "eager". That in combination with being sent the
monthly newsletter means you may have been emailed many times. I apologize for
that.

We aren't big fans of spammy emails and we've been careful to watch the number
of "spam reports" and been proud that it has been so low. However, it's good
to hear this feedback from you so we can continue to learn.

I'm always happy to talk with customers; my email is liyan@filepicker.io.

~~~
13rules
Here's the email I just received when signing up (which I did right before
Googling "Filepicker.io Hackernews" to find out more about HN's take on this
service):

Hey - just wanted to reach out and thank you for signing up for Filepicker.io.
I'm the developer assigned to help you get integrated, so let me know if you
are having any trouble, want to know more, or just to say hi. It's always fun
to hear from our users. -Brett van Zuiden

Simple. To the point. No pressure.

Now that I know that this was sent out manually by Brett instead of just
another spammy auto-responder I like it even more.

I'd rather have a developer contact me and really want a reply rather than
some HTML newsletter with tons of information and sales tactics on it.

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nicholasreed
Can't recommend Filepicker enough. If your product involves any sort of
document/photo access, you should try them out! I've been using it for a few
months and have been pleased with the integration friendliness for a web-first
developer like myself, the enthusiastic support (of course, small team, we'll
how it scales), and variety of services connected. I especially like the
"filter services by mime type" feature. The "save to" is massively useful from
a consumer perspective as well.

Edit: A bit more context more my enthusiasm.

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JoshTriplett
I like the concept of filepicker.io: a standardized widget for providing files
that handles local files, remote URLs, and services people use. However, every
time I read the phrase "by inserting a few lines into their source code", I
think 'yeah, and one of those is a script tag pointing at a third-party
server'. And sure enough, looking at the documentation, I see exactly that.

I really wish web services would start providing instructions for self-hosting
all scripts.

~~~
tagx
We currently try to push people towards pointing the script tag to us so that
we can more rapidly iterate on the product.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I understand the motivation; that doesn't make it acceptable for all sites,
especially sites that care about minimizing their vulnerability surface. And
since browsers don't currently have any security model for third-party scripts
other than "full capabilities of the site that loads them", third-party
scripts significantly increase the vulnerability surface of a site.

If browsers had a way to let third-party scripts run in a sandbox separate
from the site, so that (for instance) filepicker.io can help with file uploads
without having the full permissions of the logged-in users on every site that
uses it, I'd have much less objection to third-party scripts.

~~~
theotherone
You can run their scripts in an iframe, e.g.:

[http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-08-13-tarsnap-credit-
ca...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-08-13-tarsnap-credit-cards.html)

~~~
JoshTriplett
Yeah, I normally do that when dealing with APIs that want to use third-party
scripts. I'd just like to see more APIs that support running with local
versions of the scripts, to avoid the need for a separate untrusted domain.

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garethsprice
When I first heard of filepicker.io I thought it was a stupid idea. File
uploads aren't hard to do, after all, so why pay a third party service for it?
However, used Filepicker at the NY eCommerce Hackathon recently because we
needed to implement file uploads in a hurry and was very impressed with it.

Took about 5 minutes to get image uploads enabled in our web app, including
allowing people to take pictures directly from a webcam. No screwing around
with file POSTs, sanitizing, storage, CDNs etc.

Looking forward to using it in a real project.

~~~
eps
> ... in a hurry

But that's exactly it - if you are in a hurry, you'd be more willing to create
a dependency on 3rd party and take on the risks that you can avoid otherwise.
I'm sure there is a market for filepicker-like webapp component services, I
just suspect that their user base is going to be highly transient ( _edit_ \-
or hard to monetize on).

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kennystone
Getting customer data into your system is harder than it looks. Flash
uploaders are pretty crappy, but you need them for IE users and direct to S3.
Flash is broken for mobile, of course, as is the whole 'upload from computer'
concept. Box, DropBox, Google Drive, flickr, and everything else is extremely
popular, so if you start implementing all those yourself it adds significant
development time and code to maintain. Filepicker has been a huge win for us
at PlanGrid.

~~~
akoumjian
Just FYI, for xhr to S3 you can set up a proxy which fakes the CORS headers.
You might have already been aware of that.

Filepicker looks neat. I wish it had been around when we were building our
service.

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jmathai
That explains why nearly every Filepicker blog post makes it to the front
page! :)

