I refuse to use Dropbox after Condoleezza Rice was appointed to their board.<p><a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/protests-continue-against-dropbox-after-appointing-condoleezza-rice-to-board" rel="nofollow">http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/protests-continue-a...</a><p>I hope these protests hurt Dropbox's image and business and they replace Rice with someone who isn't a war criminal.
Stuff like this is why I like Dropbox even though it's more expensive. File syncing is their bread and butter. It's their main business, not a sideshow. They're always going to do this better than anyone else.
What I'm feeling about this? This is a great feature, but I don't trust the brand.<p>I'm really anxious about Canonical releasing the Ubuntu One Server project as open source <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers" rel="nofollow">https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers</a>, soon as it happens I will dedicate to make it mainstream. Can you imagine the possibilities? decentralized synchronization, multiple storages protocols like S3 or FTP.<p>File synchronization is a hard thing to do, but I don't see common sense on making it centralized. Really have high hopes when Ubuntu One is released.
The Dropbox team has been working hard on Webhooks for some time now, it looks like this is a much-needed tool for developers.<p>For example, a little under a year ago I released a mobile writing app that synced using the Dropbox Sync API. Right out of the gate there were problems syncing large documents, specifically due to slow mobile connections. The webhooks functionality (while I haven't launched a version of the app that implements this) allows me to check for changes quickly on a server before syncing files on the user's device.<p>Kudos to the team on adding a much-needed feature to the Dropbox functionality.
If anyone has questions, feedback or comments about webhooks or the Dropbox API more broadly, feel free to post here<p>You can also ping me at levine at dropbox
Wow, they've been building up to this one for I think years. Very happy to see it. Having a real-time* filesystem available is going to great for not only the big projects like web hosting but I can imagine a ton of little in house tools that could make use of this.<p>* We know which type of real-time we're talking about...
Speaking of the devil... as of a few hours ago she is still defending the NSA programs.<p><a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25762917/condoleezza-rice-defends-nsa-spying-at-tech-conference" rel="nofollow">http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25762917/condoleezza-...</a>
Is there a file storage protocol?<p>On the same note, it would be cool to have this protocol to drive the development of Dropbox (and other file storage services for that matter) in the same way that Git drives what is capable on Github.
Webhooks or no, Dropbox has already nailed down the core features but the Rice situation is gnawing at me.<p>I would love to see a canonical list of alternatives to Dropbox, I still have 30GB in free layers(thanks University promotions), but the more I think about it, the less I want to keep using Dropbox.<p>So some options are to set up your ownCloud at VPS, use Google Drive, or Microsoft Skydrive or something else.<p>Problem with latter two is that those are not exactly highly ethical choices either.<p>On the other hand ownCloud fails the grandma test something that Dropbox has been excellent at.<p>What other options are there?