blackdanube

Brilliant, thank you very much!

That all sounds really interesting and I'd love to read more on that. Do you have a book or an article that would be a good start on reading up on this?

Which ones do you think have potential? I'm asking because I'm on the list and would like to know what you think.

I'm on the list, too, and I could understand downvotes (if people don't like the links), but vicious comments... I don't get why people do that.

I think most people don't realize how much work goes into making any of these "junk" or "side project" projects.

There are also other things you could monetize that would make it easier for people to open their wallets.

Customization is probably a good thing, i.e. the subdomain and own-domain thing.

Physical stuff is always good, so I'd love to pay for an automatically created photobook/photobook-ready-PDF (I hate to do them in the crummy software supplied by the printer). Or, go one step further even and allow direct upload to Lulu. Basically a Make-your-own-coffee-table-book.

In any case, you might want to think about specifically targeting power users from the start, instead of going for the freemium market.

2) I see, but that still means that the data is shown twice, doesn't it? Once in the little bar-graphy-thingy to the right and once in the name placement.

3) Both structural and cosmetic would be nice. I know that at the moment the graph is for navigation only, but why not make it another tool to tell an aspect of my story? Don't worry about it at the moment, that's something for the roadmap.

4) Wow, yeah, that is confusing. Why don't you start out with an empty map widget (without the location marker) or just a link that says "add a location" or something of that sort.

5) Yes, it is, and that's why it's important to let the user enter them. That you add them automatically is nice, but not always perfect, as you can see on one of your demos, http://mystorify.com/a/BjYb08qE. The first and the last fields are obviously not what you'd want there. Also, again the question, why not allow it as a tool to complement my story?

6) Exactly. =) Start out with a good automatic timeline, but let me edit it anyway. What if I have highly inhomogenous events? Perhaps, I don't know, two vacations to the same place. That would probably show up as a month or even a year display, but a gapped timeline would be better in that case.

Looks pretty great so far, and I really like the pages you're creating.

Just a handful of things:

1. I don't like logging in with my Google Account. I can see that you're using my Google pictures so you're going to need that. I don't like it anyway.

2. I completely don't understand the graph at the left hand side of your pages. Perhaps it's number of photos (but then that info appears twice, right?). Or is it text written? Or is it distance covered? Or is it coolness of the segment? Some information would be nice.

3. Or even better, how about customizing that area? I know you're quite early in development, but I'd expect to see some interaction there.

4. The location was a little off when I loaded my non-geotagged pictures. It placed them somewhere in Slovakia for some reason. After placing one of my segments into Africa, the overall location marker moved to Germany.

5. These little info boxes are cool. Can I do them myself, please?

6. The time line is interesting, but I'd like to customize that a bit better. In my case, there's lots of empty space at the top and the bottom because I arrived on Saturday and left on Tuesday, causing empty weeks there.

Ok, that was a bit of stuff. Don't take is as criticism, I really like the concept, but I'd also like to see it developed a bit more.

There's also "Cabel car" instead of "Cable car" in the Hammetschwand demo page.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll think about it.

You're probably right that Amazon holds your data for as long as that, however, there's another way to look at 11 nines: If you upload one hundred billion (10^11) files on Glacier, you expect to lose one of them per year, and not more. That's probably realistically achievable.

Compare this with S3, where you will lose 1 in one billion files per year. Shocking!

Not necessarily. A guy working in the workshop of a mechanic vs. a secretary in the same shop don't share the hierarchy you outline, yet the piece still works.

In any case, it was just a cheap shot at the silly point that specialization is bad.

I edited to add the disclaimer. Thanks for calling me out on that.

I understand that most people on HN will probably use Glacier directly, and that is totally OK. The service that I am offering is not "making it possible", rather it's "making it simple, so much so that your grandmother can use it". You do use Dropbox in the same way, don't you? Also, the reason it's obscure is that is less than a week old and has less than 40 users. I wouldn't expect any offering of that age/size to be well-known, so I'm quite satisfied with my obscurity.

ct is cents. For Europe, that will be Euro cents, all other areas will be billed in USD cents.

Note that Glacier+Arq also allows you something entirely different from CrashPlan and incremental backups: Data archives. I.e. you can store data there cheaply that you don't have to keep available on your hard drive. Very useful for storing data that's too large to have on your drives all the time, like the pictures and videos mentioned in other comments in this thread.

That is indeed true, there are currently no mechanisms in place for ensuring users' data in case of insolvency. However, we're working on getting an escrow agreement in place that would ensure that Glacier vaults can be transferred to their "owners" in the case of insolvency. Additionally, there are some provisions in german GmbH laws that give warning before insolvency occurs and allow clean processing in the case.

Concerning the price, it is indeed a multiple of pure Glacier. However, they include, apart from lots of convenience, also all auxiliary costs that you'd have to manage yourself for a "pure" Glacier account. As noted in another comment, you'd have to keep an eye on retrieval cost, early deletion and additional S3 storage for metadata.

If you're not interested in tinkering with IAM keys and retrieval rates, I still think Bit Chest is a good value proposition.

Disclaimer: I am the owner of Bit Chest.

Do you show the free quota in the UI as well? Or is there any option to tell it to always stay below the free quota?

Actually, even in your use case, the cost of glacier (or some other service like http://bit-chest.com/ ) is justified. However, you have to see it as a kind of "fire insurance" for your files. Even if the total monetary cost, computing time and materials that you use to store the files yourself is probably a lot smaller than putting your files in Glacier, what you get from Glacier is that the files there are SAFE. Eleven nines safe. No worries about burning houses, earthquakes, storms, flooded data centres, just safe. Getting that degree of safety would be hard to do on your own, and probably push your costs into similar regions as the ones that Amazon offers.

For people who just want to put their data on Glacier without having to worry about the details, there's also Bit Chest at http://bit-chest.com/

It works more or less the same as Glacier, only with a lot of cushion around it.

--- edit: Disclaimer: I am the owner of Bit Chest.

That sounds totally wrong. As others have pointed out, specialization is the main ingredient in successful division of labor.

Read my variant at http://shezi.posterous.com/over-specialization-is-the-curse-...

To be honest, that's a tracking parameter, so I know where the clicks come from. You'd be surprised where HN percolates to! Maybe I should do a write-up on that.

The Icebox fiasco is the fact that for a pretty long time, Ice Box Pro allowed watching every user's complete credentials (including Amazon keys) via a simple change in the URL parameter.

You can read the details of the vulnerability here: http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-informat...

However, much more telling is the story in the comments of the original IceBoxPro thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619411

Dropbox synchronizes your files everywhere instantly. Bit Chest archives your files and you download them only when you need them.

This makes it practical for storing large amounts of data, like a 1TB picture archive (like I do).

There's also the commercial Imprys at http://imprys.com/ for the iPad, which is my creation.