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Their promise seems ambitious, the app has a really nice design so I think it worths trying it out. I'm already adding some files in for testing purposes!
My beta link invite if anyone wants to try it out too: https://beta.hive.im/join/527/
@lehartel: A question that has been in the air about Hive. What's your business model and how can you ensure that Hive won't disappear in a year being that it's almost too easy to have a free for life account?
This may be help a bit - https://torrentfreak.com/hive-a-... Liam McCallum seems to be CEO. https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam... - would love if he could answer questions
@ryandawidjan Hive licenses media encoding APIs from QVIVO (http://www.qvivo.com/). I highly recommend them if you are thinking about building a cloud service that deals with media files.
We're a separate company however. I'll ask Liam to jump on and chat.
@surfy Absolutely not. For example, there are no public pages to stumble upon from Google as all your files are only available to your approved friend's list on Hive. Think of Hive as Dropbox (without public files) but removing all limits and making it easier than ever to share.
IMO the platform and marketing is missing the one indispensable thing every new cloud storage provider must have given the political climate right now - full encryption. Snowden's "avoid Dropbox because they don't have encryption" comments are everywhere in media right now. This app may actually have it, but they don't mention anything about it or even security for that matter. Specifically when there's such a focus on "social" in their marketing copy, mentioning the other side of the spectrum (privacy) is imperative. Maybe I'm the only one thinking this though.
@colemercer Well put. I think now, more than ever, people would PAY to the peace of mind that comes will full encryption. I would.
@colemercer I just read the terms and privacy policy. Side note: They are in Hong Kong.
In the terms, they basically say that they have to read your files in order to provide targeted advertising. I think we all assumed that, but just putting it out there. So, this means that files are not encrypted. They are using https on their site, so I'm hopefully that the data transfer is secure. cc @danielkempe @stttories
The terms also say that you have to have ALL rights associated with the content you're storing. So, I would assume you couldn't store any music, movies, or tv shows that you've "purchase"--you're really only renting them.
They also say that "excessive users" will be warned via email and potentially cut off from the service.
An interesting part of the Terms is that you are granting them full authority to do whatever it takes for them to get the files to you. This ranges from managing them to playing them back to you. So, one of my thoughts is, let's assume we could store music files on their service: what if they store a single music file and just keep tabs of whomever is authorized to access that file. So, 1,000 people all upload the same song, but on their servers they only store 1 copy of that song and just have a database with the 1,000 people that can access that song. This would help with the economics of the situation. cc @brackin
I think I had other thoughts, but I've since forgotten them.
@colemercer That's a fair comment. Hive uses the same AES encryption as Dropbox, but also like Dropbox we hold the keys so it's not a complete zero-knowledge service, nor do we pretend to be. As a free, unlimited cloud service, zero-knowledge encryption would require us to disable data de-duplication which is not economically feasible.
Privacy is extremely dear to us. Our servers are all hosted in Germany where privacy is taken seriously and nothing but a court order would require us to reveal user's data.
From Hive's terms:
"Hive reserves the right to terminate Free Accounts at any time, with or without notice. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, if a Free Account is inactive for ninety (90) days, then Hive may delete any or all of Your Files without providing additional notice."
There are many services that I don't access that often. Especially if I am using it for storage and archival. So having stuff deleted without notice equates to "unreliable" to me.
The economics don't make sense to me. Your bet is that storage will keep getting cheaper, most users won't store much and some will pay for premium features. The problem is normal users don't hit storage limits, so your service is inherently for power-users, that will be much more costly and smaller in numbers.
@brackin I don't see this as inherently for power users. It's an advertising supported, "free" service with (so far) an absence of any power-user targeted marketing. Free speaks to the masses, even when it's not really free, and I suspect they're after that crowd.
@alxmlv I too have grown very skeptical of services that offer too much for free.
What's the use of an awesome free service if it gets shut down?
Better pay a bit less, but having a sustainable business that will support you over the years.
Let's see (and hope) that they can keep up and avoid the Springpad (sad) way.
@mbavio premium features for a payment, but the more friends you have the cheaper the price of the premium features get -- all the way down to $0 if you have more than 100 friends. Are they harvesting user data then?
@miles_matthias I have no idea, would be nice to have a "Maker" in here, don't you think?
@alxmlv We are well funded and we believe that users will want to pay for Premium features post Beta. We're also thrilled to have a premier hosting company as an investor (announcement soon) which more than helps with our operating costs.
Seems too good to be true. And it's the kind of service that you need to depend on. Don't wanna start using it to find they disappear one day. Would rather pay $10/month to know that it's going to be around for a long long time.
They would do themselves a lot of good by releasing some mobile apps. Native Mac/Windows/Linux apps wouldn't hurt either...
@alexspencer Mobile apps should arrive in about a months time. There are no plans for desktop apps though - we'll continue to push our web app for that.
...but we have an API, so we may release that to the community in the future.
Hello all, I'm the founder and CEO of Hive. Happy to answer all your questions. I'll reply to some of the one's below now.
@lehartel Hi Thierry, thanks for jumping on here :)
I like the design and how easy it is to get started.
I love the unlimited cloud storage.
As of late I have been keen on questioning privacy policies for cloud solutions, so I encourage @lehartel and team to be very open about their privacy policy and where they stand relative to Dropbox. I saw @McCroden's comment and maybe it's a bit extreme to get into those details with your standard user, but totally worth it in the long haul.
Ballpark