HN Explorer

Poll: would you pay for a virtual filesystem to your social data?

42 points by zemanel ↗ HN
A service that allowed you, in a perfect world, to, for example:

- ("local" filesystem) copy your Instagram pictures and paste them on a Facebook album or on a local folder

- copying your twitpic pictures into your Dropbox

- and so on (interoperable across web applications)

47 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread
lwhi
Yes if I had read/write access.
zemanel
that's the plan. Copying a folder with pictures from your ~/Pictures folder into a facebook album or copying all your facebook albuns into your ~/Pictures folder, through your very own operative system at least (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOs, Android).

An web management application is also possible, although i would be not as much flexible with "downloading"

lwhi
Could I use it to delete / wipe my account info if required too?

EDIT: As in deleting the info contained in my Facebook Account.

zemanel
As in deleting your twitter account? Not really. But wicked stuff as seeing your facebook friends as an address book/vcard's is possible
chwahoo
My gut reaction is that this sounds like something I don't have a pressing need for. So the real answer is, you'd have to come up with a really compelling story for why this would improve my life and then build a slick implementation to match. I'm definitely not sold by this quick description/bullet points.

I'm not even quite sure what you're suggesting. Is this mainly a picture cross-sharing implementation? (Or are you thinking more broadly about social data? If so, how would status posts/tweets be handled... as files?)

zemanel
Not data as e-mails, twitter posts, but i'm targeting media files, as in:

- facebook albums - twitpic, instagram, picsplz pictures

any web application which has an API and allows red/write capabilities through it.

ivankirigin
You're starting to see a bit of this already with app integrations of Dropbox. There is little reason this apps couldn't monitor the status of their sandbox folders to get desktop write functionality working.
chwahoo
I think this is an awesome trend by the way. I love the idea of my social/web data living on my dropbox and I get to choose which apps use it. What would be even more compelling would be a standard interface for this sort of thing, so there could be many dropbox-like providers of storage.
Samuel_Michon
Because Apple's iOS lacks a traditional folder structure where apps can share all sorts of data, many apps have integrated with Dropbox, making it the iOS' "virtual filesystem".

This could work for web apps as well. The beauty of web apps is that you're not tied to one machine, you can log in anywhere. Integrating with Dropbox should be a great way to avoid storing information locally just to share it between web apps.

araneae
If it would allow me to delete my Facebook wall history... yes. Only then :)
zemanel
if the facebook api allows it, it can be done. you would see your wall as files, hence, deletable
fields
How would you manage metadata?
zemanel
i don't really plan to, but i've thought about it and there are ways for simple cases. For example posting into a blog. You would create a folder bellow "tags" with the tag name of the post, and create an (HTML) file in which the filename would be the post title and it's contents the post itself. As you can see, it's not very flexible. My main goal is easier managing "media files". For further categorization, you would use the webapp's self interface. But getting the file attachments of your blog posts would be a piece of cake, if the blog has an API. Or even your posts as files.
elvirs
use it? -probably yes. pay for it? -nope.
zemanel
any thoughts on what you would use it for, if you had free access?
elvirs
i post lots of links of funny pictures, graphs, amazing designs etc. uploaded to places like twitpic, etc. to facebook, twitter, etc. I would like to make a copy of each of them to one of the free storage services like may be picasa web albums.
Andys
Only if it supports "rm -R"
zemanel
the thing is that #1 it does :) #2 i wouldn't be responsible for it
DanielBMarkham
Seeing as how I wrote a version of this several years ago, yes.

But as another commenter said, you have to show a need.

They say to show people using your startup in a normal workflow. So if you had 2 or 3 examples of somebody interacting with their computer and how much easier it is with your app, it would probably hit home better than just a description.

I think the killer feature here is the ability to search for new social apps and auto-signup. It has the potential to turn the social networking thing upside down. (But like all really cool ideas, the audience is probably even "cooler" than the idea)

zemanel
Indeed, to the "cool" and also "show a need". I'm currently looking for the "need".

Take for example, Flick, Picasa and similar. At first it doesn't seem a use case because there are already dozens of online, offline and hybrid applications to manage those collections. But when you add "web interoperability" to it, as in, copy/pasting/moving from into/out of those and into other webapps (copying some pictures from Flick into Posterous, directly) it starts to sound a lot more exciting and worth exploring, which is where i'm at at the moment.

jf
My "need" for something like this would be so I could have an effortless way to keep backups of all of my social network data. In fact, ideally this product would be integrated into Dropbox, since that's already part of my backup "strategy".

I would pay money for this. In fact, I'd be willing to pay money now, up front, for a proof-of-concept.

zemanel
For backups you have

www.backupify.com

which is not mine, but you can send me 20$ for helping you solve that problem :)

jf
This is cool, but not as elegant as what you described. Where do I send the money?
gsharma
What do you mean by pay? A periodic subscription or more of a one time app payment (say 99 cents)?

If we are just talking about pictures/media files and a subscription - No, I won't pay. There have been (rare) times when I cross-posted pictures from Instagram to facebook. It wasn't that big of a deal to upload that image to Facebook.

I might think about paying a one time fee if the app is really good.

zemanel
probably "pay per use", meaning it would be free to a certain level.
moxiemk1
Yes. But to be fair, upon knowing that this would be possible with the constituent services APIs and that someone was charging for it, I would immediately embark upon making a free clone.

Honestly, an API-filesystem framework would be kind of sweet. But I can't imagine the kind of people who would pay for this aren't the same people who could eventually write it. And be faster at adding new/random services, etc.

zemanel
But you wouldn't have me on your team and i'm all kinds of sexy
gcv
I personally would not, but more importantly, I think very few non-geeks would. Most people don't get hierarchical filesystems; they are thoroughly unintuitive to non-programmers. I shudder at the thought of trying to explain that "this folder is actually (sort of) the same thing as that Facebook album."
zemanel
that has been noted a lot. a solution could be implementing also a web interface, in a sense like for example shared hosting providers had, for people who didnt understood ftp.
cellularmitosis
If I ever leave facebook, etc, I would be willing to pay for a one-time use of this to make a dump. Although how would you allow me to install a fuse plugin which was only good for a day? I guess you'd have to offer the dump as a tarball, or host it as a network filesystemwhich I was only allowedto mount for a day.
leif
Not as a consumer product, no.

More abstractly, if you provided a unified API across many platforms which application developers could use to access any such service, it would be a massive hit.

When POSIX got to a point where you could assume it was mostly implemented across OSes, it decimated development cost.

If you could define a good cross-platform API for web services (and provide an implementation), developers would beg you to take their money.

zemanel
Off the top of my head, i believe theres actually room for that
bpedro
Have you tried http://tarpipe.com ? It offers such an API and a visual programming environment where you can interconnect different web services.
leif
yeah this is not what I am thinking of, I want some header files or something
astrofinch
I noticed myself strongly considering a vote for Yes or Maybe even though if I saw this as a completed product on the Hacker News front page, I can't see myself actually shelling out any money for it.

Basically, I suspect that I (and likely people in general) would buy many more products in the hypothetical than they will in reality. This might have something to do with near/far thinking: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html. My hypothesis: because we're talking about something that you might create in the future, we decide whether we would buy it using far mode thinking. But we do all of our actual buying in near mode. So peoples' hypothetical predictions about what they would buy might not be worth much.

zemanel
i chose "pay" instead of just asking "using", because i assumed it would have a different impact on the votes, which im taking as mere opinions of course, as in "ill just take it because it's free" versus "hum i have to pay for that". Also thats what i really wanted to know
drdaeman
I believe filesystem alone aren't enough. There must be a means to browse it.

For pictures that's simple, but let's consider a Facebook wall (with replies). A bunch of text files would be hard to browse, a single big mailbox-like file would be hard to edit properly.

Considering that there're multiple OSes, tools and workflow preferences, I doubt there is some universal representation, which would satisfy users.

malkia
Q: FUSE for Linux/OSX? And Dokan or CBFS for Windows? Or homemade?
scrrr
If 42 people say yes, 260 say no and 50 say maybe, how would you interpret it?

Should this software be built?

zemanel
It can be interpreted the way you want it to be, for example:

bad) 86% said the would not pay for it

good) 14% said they would pay, just by reading the idea on a few bullet points

the comments were most useful and it resulted in a developer advocate for one of the biggest companies out there, to throw 100USD on paypal to develop a specific feature

bpedro
Interesting. Who threw the $100?