Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

I work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News.<p>A few points that might interest yall:<p>1. We won't publish to facebook or twitter without your explicit permission.<p>2. We ask for information about your facebook profile because it will make Dropbox better. It's mainly about learning about our users without annoying surveys. We won't mandate facebook connect on signup so this is likely going to be the main path in the near term for people to facebook connect. Facebook auth also makes it really easy to post to facebook when you want to; the user experience is better.<p>3. Yes, runjake is right. Please do subscribe if you love Dropbox. I work here, so I set my capacity to 5TB and symlink everything important on my system (Desktop, Documents, etc) to Dropbox. The experience of coming to a home computer and having the stuff I was working on just appear is nothing less than magical. This is enabled by having more than a few gigs of storage.<p>4. If you want terabytes of storage, come work here. It is the best tech company in the valley: <a href="http://www.dropbox.com/jobs" rel="nofollow">http://www.dropbox.com/jobs</a><p>Ask me anything.

Here's a more simple task I was able to perform for 50GB of space:<p>1.) Sign up for a $9 50GB membership.<p>2.) Go through their wizard to set up a recurring $9 Paypal payment.<p>3.) There is no step 3.<p>Time spent: 3 minutes<p>Karma spent: You support a great company that doesn't screw you over.

I trust Dropbox immensely. I clicked all of those buttons without really reading the specifics.<p>1. I trust that they're not doing anything scummy or underhanded. My life's on Dropbox, and they're not going to do anything to reduce that level of trust.<p>2. If I ended up accidentally Tweeting that I love Dropbox, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.<p>This said, the messaging was very clear, and everything behaved as expected. Great work as usual, guys.

<i>Tell us why you love Dropbox</i> = 128 MB.<p>And to think of all the time and wasted energy we spent early on trying to get user feedback. Incentives are a wonderful thing!

I love Dropbox from a usability point of view, but unfortunately the missing encryption is the main reason why it's not an option for me right now. I'd like to also be able to backup sensitive data, but I don't trust the Dropbox employees with access to my data.<p>Instead, I'm currently using Wuala which encrypts the data diretly on the client. An alternative to Wuala seems to be SpiderOak, which also features client side encryption (but I didn't try this one yet).

The brilliant thing about all of the free space that Dropbox "gives away" is that most people who get it (90%? more?) don't actually use it.<p>I'm up to 4.9GB of free space, but I'm only using 7.6%, so I'm well under 2GB. And I would venture to guess that I'musing more space than the average free user.<p>So their cost isn't even the pretty-low cost of (cost to store 128MB * the number of people who do the task). It's the tiny cost of (cost to store 128MB * the number of people who do the task * percentage of those people that actually use the space).

So what does "Connect your Twitter account to Dropbox" actually mean?<p>They're asking for read/write permission, which makes me wonder if it's going to post every time I change a file or something. No thanks.

I'm sorry, your settings for facebook are WAY over the top! Common, you want to be able to access my data anytime? What are you guys planning to do? Explain why you are asking for this. A lot of people did, I'm sure, but this is way fishy for me. I do trust dropbox (and I'm a paid user, so you have my credit card) but it is a request for access for something you do not use.<p>Why? Please explain!

Is this a marketing trick of some sort? I'm getting a login form and that's it.

I thought this was a clever way of incentivising people to authorise Dropbox to access their Facebook and Twitter accounts.<p>I don’t suppose I would normally have posted to my Facebook wall about Dropbox, nor my Twitter account, but now I have.<p>Presumably the cost to Dropbox is quite minimal (768MB extra free space in total). It’s made me think about ways in which we could offer similar incentives at $dayjob.

Not sure the exact mechanics behind it, but it's pretty awesome to see the growl notification of my space being increased almost immediately after clicking the authorization buttons on this page. Just fits right in with Dropbox being an incredible service.

"I love Dropbox because I'm getting 128MB of space added to my account if I say this."

Authorized, followed @dropbox, told them why I loved it, posted about it &#38; de-authorized Twitter, easiest 512mb I made under 30 seconds.<p>Sidenote to Dropbox: Buy a SSL certificate that supports dropbox.com without the www.

256mb for logging on to facebook? PFFFT that's 5Gb minimum. I'm 2 months without login in to Facebook now and this isn't enough to kill my downtime.<p>Increase the incentive ;p

I just received an email from someone I barely knew, to use Dropbox. He had no business sending me this email, and by sending it on his behalf you put yourself and him in this situation where both of you engage in sending SPAM.<p>I stopped short of clicking the "report spam" button, but it cost you some amount of goodwill, so you lose either way. I will be a lot less likely now to genuinely recommend your app to my friends.

Going to be another person to chime in to say Dropbox is awesome. I use it for passing podcast recordings back and forth with my cohost (while we're editing), as well as hosting and backing up arbitrary photos, HTML, and presentations. I still have plenty of free space (thanks to awesome stuff like this, and the 2x referrals for students), but when I hit my cap I'll have no qualms about paying.

If anything, Dropbox isn't thinking big enough. They really need to start thinking about how to provide a ubiquitous, multi-platform, private, cloud filesystem. Stop encouraging people to "back up" their files, and start using encouraging people to store the primary copy of all their files on Dropbox.<p>On Windows, Dropbox shows up as "My Documents/My Dropbox". When really "My Documents" should be the dropbox.

Can someone who knows more about Facebook apps and their API than I do tell me what a company would want with permission to "Access my data any time" and "Access my photos and videos"?

Maybe it was just me, but I totally didn't "get it" at first that these were sort of steps that build on each other and should be done in order.<p>So it seemed really strange to me that I had to connect my twitter account before I could follow @dropbox, and the error message you get when you click on the follow one before the auth one is not very descriptive.<p>Otherwise, really cool offer, thanks guys.

Maybe it would be better if you could change the message before tweeting/posting to FB. I wrote something to DB that I didn't want to tweet. So I didn't do the last 2 steps, which were presumably the most important ones. I realize that not being able to change the message, is to try and ensure that the tweet is really about loving Dropbox.

The feature I need most. From the IPhone app, I would like to be able to select a file and email the file to myself or someone else - not the link to the file. Dropbox is blocked at work but sometimes I really need to get an important file from there. I'm a paying susbcriber. Keep up the good work!

Seems to me that Dropbox will have a pretty good asset here a la rapleaf. If they get enough people to voluntarily give them their twitter and facebook IDs, Dropbox will have a very accurate lookup service of email|facebook|twitter -- that's something a lot of companies are after these days.

After authorizing with Twitter, I got redirected to an error page on the Dropbox site (Error (5xx)).

A good test of a product is how many people are willing to give you a positive review to their friends/family/colleagutes/etc<p>Keep up the good work Dropbox, you ROCK!!<p>PS: Who could have thought that so much innovation could happen with something so seemingly small (an "online disk drive")

This let me get rid of that dangling 256MB that had been lingering since I opened the account and got the first free 256MB. That has been bothering my OCD. Now I have an even 12GB.

I love dropbox but giving it complete access to my facebook besides all my files is pretty much handing my "social life" and my "work life" to a single company.

Any word on supporting encryption? It seems like aside from partial sync it is the only big thing you guys are missing...

You guys at Dropbox rock at neat marketing gimmicks that make your users feel good about promoting the product.

I've performed all the tasks, but I don't think I've gotten any extra space. :(

I did all of them except the two Facebook ones. That was a bit too far for me.

This is an amazing marketing strategy. Very simple and effective, IMHO.

That is some insane viral marketing, other companies should take note!

I wish dropbox was opensource.<p>I would like to sync via my home server, not cloud.