drop.io at Facebook Dev Austin Garage, SXSW

perspective re: developing for the ‘social network’

1. context / approach

2. evolving perspective

3. evolving experiments

simple, private, real time file-sharing and collaboration

we are:

in 2 clicks, instantiate a drop == a live real-time point of rich media exchange

share and collaborate with whom you want for your ends

you define identity, access, and context off-system …

we just do ‘signal’

- enabling workgroups/teams

- enabling classroom

- enabling live event

…where identity and distro are implicit in the relationship

Used for:

when you want a full ‘firehose’ of rich content

- immediately - flatly available - within a defined loop

1. context / approach

2. evolving perspective

3. evolving experiments

‘content’ -> value scales with distribution (‘the dark knight’)

‘information’ -> value inversely related to distribution (coke’s formula)

the web has done well by content,

but poorly by information

FB has a role to play for both,

(source) who am I

(signal) what am I saying

(distro) to whom am I saying it

all highly inter-related, but ultimately independent

identity (profile) & then

signal (fb photos, status) & then

distro (feed)

but things are evolving

identity (no)

signal (no)

distro (YES ++)

identity (validated profile, YES)

signal (fb photos, status, YES)

distro (feed, YES)

strong provider of all three, but each is now truly independently leverage-able

1. context / approach

2. perspective

3. resulting experiments

a year ago people were primarily using FB apps for distro,

we were trying to leverage identity

last year: we said,

“we will take care of private sharing / exchange,

…FB (via apps) will allow us harvest the benefits of identity, and distribution without dealing with them ourselves”

1. FB app as ‘my account’ – an app for privately aggregating drop.io activity (identity)

2. FB app as an optional context/distro ‘wrapper’ for drops (distro), a different but real ‘group’

1. fail

2. mostly fail

because…

1. our core app wasn’t yet good enough

2. fb app platform wasn’t good enough/the integration was too cumbersome

just too confusing

and too many clicks

now…

1. fb connect as distro… out there, promising.

2. fb connect as identity, *pending*, promising.

just get rid of passwords…?

one year later,

- same game

- but now pull out what we need, rather than push in our value