Where are my buckets of money? Oh yeah, I don't care.
If a fancy website is all I need, I guess that's what I'll be doing this weekend. And I guess SSL and CNAME support...
To be fair, the "fancy website" is a byproduct of designers who like to make stuff look good, and the rest of Showoff's team caring very much about not just making stuff that works (of which they make a lot, much of which is hidden away in obscurity), but about making it easy for people to use who wouldn't perhaps take on the task themselves—and I don't think there is anything at all wrong with that.
However, I don't think it is fair to imply creating this tool (and its website) was a product of caring about money, or duplicating and obscuring your (or anyone else's) efforts. It is like many other ideas out there that came from a real need, hacking it together, and then asking if people might find it useful enough to pay for it. That's not a reason to disparage or diminish a job well done.
In the end, it looks like Showoff's also brought attention to your project, pagekite, and plenty of other ways people have shared to do the same thing. Today was the first time I'd heard of localtunnel, but I've done this same bit of showing off localhost before for clients and coworkers on my own--and it's a bit like splitting hairs to call it duplication. Hackers hack. It's what we do. I definitely like open sourcing when it makes sense. But I also like to eat and have a roof over my head. Open source does not hold a monopoly on good intentions.
The idea is clearly communicated, pros and cons and alternatives discussed... and now it's a tiny bit easier to explain to people what we are doing.
Hats off to the Showoff team for a job well done! :-)
It's great to have the idea validated, especially since mine and showoff.io's user experience are nearly identical. And this will force me to make a pretty homepage and add features.
So now that I've complained, I don't think I can complain much more.
Now... open source vs commercial, that's a whole different discussion (although probably not what you'd expect).
Casually suggesting NIH can be an insult to the intellectual & creative abilities of a team. Sometimes it is warranted. Other times, it is not. I believe most guys and gals in the developer community are astute enough to ferret out NIH and ignore it.
P.S. On the other hand, you have a very impressive set of github repos. Kudos. You have successfully made me both care and jealous that I never get around to open-sourcing anything because I never feel like any side project is perfect enough to let others see (and because most of what I work on is closed-source for clients). Sad.
The whole simultaneous invention thing is really interesting to me. It was covered in two great books, What Technology Wants and Where Good Ideas Come From. Both seem to imply that the more utility something has in the "adjacent possible", the more likely it will be invented by many people in roughly the same time period. This actually quite frustrates me about technology! What's worse is that this phenomenon will only increase over time. And because it's about utility (never mind the illusion of unique "UX" of products now), there is little room for expression or creating something unique to you that matters.
On a positive note, this is the first time I thought about doing something like this, and it's also the first time I heard about your project.
I'll try it out, thanks!
Marketing is critical. And marketing isn't just telling people about it, or advertising. Marketing is making a site that is attractive (to the audience), giving your project a name that is easy to understand and remember, and easy to google for, and making it easy to use, to install, work with it, share it, troubleshoot it, making it easy to find help, easy to find other people who use it in a community. Marketing means making it clear as hell what the user gets out of your "product," and keeping the focus on the user at all times.
These are all relative, depending on your audience. (Ex: Lots of developer types actively enjoy the simplest possible visual design, and enjoy the thrill of conquering something that's a little bit technically hard. But not all. And none of them enjoy searching & searching and being unable to find the thing.)
If you don't to make money off your work, great. But if you want people to use it, you have to market it, that's just the way it works. It's not good enough to simply make something you want to make and stick it out there. Just being "free" and "open" isn't enough.
If more open source developers would take the time to learn how to effectively promote their own work, the world would be a better place. But sadly, because most OSS developers belong to a group that considers marketing "evil," and has a chip-on-the-shoulder reaction to the idea that marketing is required for even free-as-in-beer projects, it won't happen.
I know it's human nature to like prettier things, I'm just surprised when localtunnel was posted on Hacker News originally, it did not get as much attention as showoff.io and it does the EXACT same thing. I guess I'm disappointed in the community for that?
Though the real challenge this product solves is in getting around firewall restrictions. Let's say you're at the airport on free wifi. How are you going to share localhost then?
show 3100
I get it that some people aren't great at networking, but all this stuff is really basic. Not that hard to learn.
Even works at Starbucks, which I don't think DynDNS does.
This app is really neat, though. Creating an SSH tunnel is trivial once you learn how it works, but before, it seems insurmountably complicated. This service makes it super easy.
Oh, and using the same trick in reverse, I get to use Netflix, Hulu, Pandora etc. when I'm out of the country. Or just protect my privacy from Coffee shops.
:)
Um,
Assume none of the above - and instead assume that I am a designer with a local copy of the new t-shirt site im making for my hipster clients - and I am working from the local Java Jungle, not behind my 'cheapo dd-wrt + dyndns +blah blah blah'
I want to show them a latest rev and get feed back.
Use this, and its no problem. Yours is doable, non-trivial and zero elegance.
But that's just me.
On top of that, you're using your own domain, which is more professional in my humble opinion. It's lappie.yourdomain.com and not lappie.theirdomain.com ... oh yeah, and it's free. Just get one of your nerd friends to set it up. Once it's up, it'll run forever.
There is nothing wrong with your method, except that it is longer than "Step one."
This could be a great step forward in helping peopole understand, and take responsibility for their online presence.
call me oldschool, I know...
This is not one of those. This is one of those cases where I'm not a bit jealous because something so obvious or inane or dumb took off and became Twitter, but because it's just so damn fantastic. This is one of those things that is so elegant and smart that it makes me feel like a complete idiot.
This is going to do very well.