Ask HN: Dropbox as a platform? (Yet or ever?)
As I posted in another thread, I am looking for the best cloud backup option for a virtual team. I have been a dropbox user for a while, and while I love it - I think that Drew may be missing a HUGE opportunity of not (yet) realizing that dropbox is a potentially game changing platform.
Hear me out:
I have dropbox on my phone and my machines. I travel for work and incur expenses, gather project/client data, write proposals, share files with team, etc..
In one task, expense reports, when I get a receipt, I take a pic of it with my phone and upload to my expenses receipts folder in dropbox to submit.
When I want to immediately share proposal drafts, pictures from travel/client sites etc.. I upload the pics or place the files in shared folders with others on my team.
This works beautifully, but is very rudimentary as well.
The files arrive in their views as expected - but its then no different than flat data.
I would like to see DropBox as a platform, where utility apps that take advantage of dead simple file and data transfer.
Imagine an app that sat on top of dropbox and connected to it directly which allowed a more elegant data and photo sharing. With the ability to chat among users as well and keep revision control of documents between users.
This would work in the following way, lets call them DropChannels:
You create a DropChannel by placing a piece of content for sharing and inviting other users to it.
I post a pic, and say I want USER1 and USER3 to see it. They are notified of a new Channel and see the pic. They can reply in kind with a message (chat reply, like "Looks good - go ahead" etc), which gets archived into the channel's log file.
They can reply with a pic of their own, which ends up in the channels' pics dir.
Or they reply with a document, which is viewable in the same way current docs are viewable - but they get placed in the channel's docs folder.
Each channel is defined based on a topic, and all activity in that channel is archived in the channels folder which is synced between al lthe users in the channel.
The important thing is to allow chatting, collaboration and input from other users.
Allow a team to select a channel template, which will include a range of directories or files that can be tracked for a channel. For example, you could have the app have a tab for time tracking, which can be slid over to, data entered and that data is captured in a time tracking file for later billing.
Scheduling etc...
All based on the dropbox syncing API as a platform...