Show HN: SocialFolders, "Dropbox for social"

[martinpannier]

Hey fellow HN-ers,

I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word).

We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale.

We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ

If you want to try it out, you can download the app (for free of course) on socialfolders.me.

Thanks for your feedback. Next step: adding a kitty to the video and sending it to Mashable!

Edit: upvote the clickable links if you can please :)

[martinpannier]

Clickable links: screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ, website: http://socialfolders.me

[kmfrk]

Great project! I remember seeing the possibilities of something along these lines, when I browsed the recipes of ifttt that crawled your social feeds for photos by yourself and others and saved them in your Dropbox folder. If this folder were shareable, it would create a different social network all by itself! And better yet, I wouldn't have to sign up for silly social networks and Facebook in order to get access to that data.

I don't know if this is disruptive, but I hope this will help break the data lock-ins networks like Facebook and Twitter photo services are using to retain and attract users. (And what happens if one of the sites go belly-up with all your data?)

If I could make one suggestions, the site as it currently is looks like one for a generic software download. You should, eventually, try to make it look more friendly and inviting as if to say that this is a social ecosystem of sorts.

Best of luck! If you're in SF or NYC, you probably won't need it with all the people who'll throw themselves at you over a great idea like this. :)

[martinpannier]

Thanks kmfrk (a mouthful)

We'll try and make the website more friendly. As ever, juggling with multiple priorities.

We're in SF, haven't seen people throwing themselves at us just yet, but can't wait :)

[davezatch]

Just a heads up, if you click on "Getting Started" at the bottom it sends you to the "getting-started-mac" page, and the download is for mac. If I click directly on "download" it knows I'm on windows, but through the getting started vector it serves me the wrong link.

Otherwise, looks amazing, gonna give it a whirl after work.

[martinpannier]

Thanks Dave, I'll fix it ASAP

[w33ble]

I'm definitely not your client base as the few things I do put on social profiles all come from my hard drive anyway, so I have no need to back up or export them.

That said, this service looks very slick and kmfrk makes a great point about using it to liberate your photos and such and make them available to people that don't have accounts. For example, links to facebook photos are useless for me since I don't have an account there, but if the people uploading their photos there could also have them mirrored to SocialFolders or even another network where I either have an account or don't need an account to view them, that would be sweet. If they could have that happen without doing anything extra on their own (after installing the software, of course), that would be pretty amazing!

[entropie]

A simple upvote isnt enough. Awesome idea!

Edit: please give us a linux client.

[david_a_r_kemp]

Please give us a cli linux client, so I can run it on my NAS

[martinpannier]

Planned for Q2 - more to be truly cross-platform than by popular demand, to be frank :)

[ed209]

Promising start. My mum is always on at me to send her the pics of my daughter that I put on Facebook. It would be cool if I could grant her access to my Facebook folder (at the moment I accomplish this through dropbox) but your product removes a couple of steps. Will certainly keep an eye on this one :)

Have you seen http://theopenphotoproject.org/ ?

[martinpannier]

Actually we have! We're in contact with Jaisen Mathai to integrate the OpenPhoto project ASAP.

Thanks for the feedback we're going to integrate easy folder sharing as soon as humanly can! :)

[mikeknoop]

I'll admit I was initially turned off by the title of the post . It's really "buzz word" heavy -- but I checked out the YouTube video demo anyway and this is a great and much needed tool.

[martinpannier]

Wait until we get out or geolocated mobile app too!

[AndrewWarner]

1) Glad you're charging because it makes me feel like you'll be around.

2) I'm trying to sync 1 file and it's taking over 20 minutes (so far)

3) It'd be nice to allow one-way sync. I don't want to flood my MB Air's tiny drive with every photo I sent to Flickr, but I would want to upload all of my Air's photos.

[martinpannier]

Please direct support requests to [email protected]

I'll take a look at your account to see what went wrong - send me your email.

Agreed on the 1-way sync. Good idea!

[bobwebb]

This is awesome! Thanks for providing this service - there are loads of nice pictures on Facebook that I've been meaning to make a backup of for ages, now there's a tool that lets me do that without any fuss.

[edbyrne]

Export/Backup for your Social Networks - great idea.

Can I get more than just photos (files)? Can I save my data or will that get you banned from a few of the providers you integrate with!

I use Backupify for this 'anti-Cloud' type service - it backs up my Gmail. Since I use more than one PC, I'd like to see this do similar to Dropbox - sync local, in the Cloud, and be accessible through clients on any device. I suppose I could do that by putting the SocialFolders into Dropbox - but I'm not sure I want to pay on the double then.

[iusable]

This is one of those ideas that you see and go 'wasn't this done already?' But in fact it wasn't!

Love the idea and the intro. Instant User!

Tons of questions about the syncing features with different services etc.

[martinpannier]

Shoot your questions! Here or [email protected]

[djbender]

If I have the same 100MB file set on multiple social sites through SocialFolders, does that mean I have the set on my local hard drive multiple times as well?

[rheeseyb]

Looks really good. First thought - you need some sort of feedback to let the user know that their files are downloading - I've linked my Facebook account and it's downloading hundreds of photos, but I thought it was broken as it just created a bunch of empty folders. The only way I could confirm that it is working was by checking my used quota. I'm using OSX Lion by the way...

[martinpannier]

Agreed. We're working on a better menu bar icon. Will have small blue rotating arrows :)

[yatsyk]

How can you compare it to Locker [1] ?

[1] https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker

[martinpannier]

Mainly, we're file-based and we mirror all file mgmt operations on your computer. So you always have your content with you. And any offline edits (to your SocialFolders Google Docs for example) is applied online as soon as you reconnect.

And we have a business model.

[pabloPXL]

Thanks! I didn't know this project and looks pretty awesome :)

[drtse4]

Nice idea and beautifully implemented, you just gained a new user. The "moving between services" is the real killer feature, imo.

[oozcitak]

Great idea and beautiful execution. I just copy/pasted a few photos from Instagram to Facebook. I will definitely use this.

[alias1]

Very nice idea and so far the service looks pretty good. Congratulations :) I did find it a little hard to find the different pricing levels/what I get for them. I think having a page dedicated to the different account types (free, premium, etc) linked off the main menu would be good.

[mikecaron]

This looks like a great frontend for FUSE (or MacFUSE by Google, http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). I think you guys nailed the user experience because FUSE can be really difficult to setup for n00bs.

[martinpannier]

I'd totally forgotten about that project, used to use it with MacFusion. We'll check out the project again to see which of the services we could integrate (or what code/libs we could use).

[quanfucius]

So what happens when I copy my SocialFolder into my Dropbox folder? Does the universe implode? :D

[joeconway]

This is a really nice idea, well done! I'm going to try this out for a few days but I fully expect to but an annual premium account. I'd quite like it if i could turn off the menubar icon in OS X though.