A service that allowed you, in a perfect world, to, for example:<p>- ("local" filesystem) copy your Instagram pictures and paste them on a Facebook album or on a local folder<p>- copying your twitpic pictures into your Dropbox<p>- and so on (interoperable across web applications)
Seeing as how I wrote a version of this several years ago, yes.<p>But as another commenter said, you have to show a need.<p>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.<p>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)
Not as a consumer product, no.<p>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.<p>When POSIX got to a point where you could assume it was mostly implemented across OSes, it decimated development cost.<p>If you could define a good cross-platform API for web services (and provide an implementation), developers would beg you to take their money.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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: <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html</a>. 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.
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.
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.<p>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?)
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."
I don't know about a file system, but I would like them all in one place in the proper context. That is why I'm building <a href="http://MindWallet.com" rel="nofollow">http://MindWallet.com</a>. Here is our coverage of startup bus to see a little of how it works(although no one besides me has contributed, it is really really easy to do so. just log on, select an item, hit enter then tab and start typing):<p><a href="http://www.mindwallet.com:54501/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-a21a-2322e06675c3&ParentID=06f246c1-b947-434a-95ce-2ca5bf7d0584" rel="nofollow">http://www.mindwallet.com:54501/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-...</a>
I believe filesystem alone aren't enough. There must be a means to browse it.<p>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.<p>Considering that there're multiple OSes, tools and workflow preferences, I doubt there is some universal representation, which would satisfy users.
What do you mean by pay? A periodic subscription or more of a one time app payment (say 99 cents)?<p>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.<p>I might think about paying a one time fee if the app is really good.
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.