The fridge is no more than a private mailing list influenced by social networks.
It's funny, google is trying to create a new social network (buzz, orkut, wave, ...) and they have Google Groups that are real communities (spam appart) that only need some care.
I think the use cases of Buzz and something like Fridge are very dissimilar. Buzz allows you to subscribe to individuals; although when you post it's one->many, fundamentally what it's promoting is a lot of one-one connections. Although Buzz makes it a lot easier to have a group conversation than, say, Twitter (which frankly sucks in a lot of ways, but was first), it's not really a group tool.
I agree about Google Groups getting ignored; it would be nice if the eventual Google Competitor to Fridge was built on an upgrade of Groups. Perhaps one that split off the Usenet part of Google Groups completely; mixing in proprietary Google Groups and Usenet via Google wasn't ever a good idea.
I agree with you, Buzz is dissimilar to Fridge. My point is that Google is trying to copy Facebook on what Facebook does well, this is not a good strategy.
The point of The Fridge is that it is different to Facebook. That's the only way to succeed.
Google has many active Fridges in Groups, it just needs to make the management of Groups much more simple, as the Fridge does.
But, if The Fridge succeeds (I'm not sure about this), then it would be too late for Google, but this is only relevant to Google.
i agree completely and group platforms is one market we are trying to address in that Fridge groups are super easy to create, invite friends, and share/socialize.
one thing we are rolling out soon is gmail and google group contact import.
In my point of view, it should be possible to use a Fridge as a mailing list, I mean, at least, I should be able to answer comments by e-mail. It is already possible to do this on Facebook. This would help to introduce The Fridge to middle aged people who are proficient in email but don't want to "waste time" in learning new technologies. I'm thinking in small businesses.
Picture too racy to be seen by millions on the internet?
Don't post it to the internet.
Websites get hacked, confidences are violated.
(In fact, if you actually care, you shouldn't take the picture in the first place, as PCs can be hacked as well).
In truth I think a service like this is more about not having your family and colleagues being able to easily snoop in on your private life, not about giving you iron clad privacy. Or any level of social separation that you want which Facebook doesn't allow easily. Within that assumption, the fact that for example, photos of you can be posted outside that circle of trust, is just a necessary risk if you want to stay connected with your friends when most probably use social networking like facebook/etc.
Your family is part of your private life more or less by definition
Your family is part of one of your private lives. Having others can be healthy. Depending on your relationship with your family, very healthy.
And, yes, you still have to make sure that your stuff posted online passes the New York Times test: If it turns up as front page news you have to be able to survive. That said: The advantage of a social network with loudly stated privacy norms is that (a) people will be told not to share outside the list, (b) you can control which friends are on the list and hopefully keep the untrustworthy ones out; (c) when people cut-and-paste anyway, despite your precautions, they can be properly ostracized, which (one might hope) will teach them some manners.
Backups? I'm less concerned about my Facebook pictures leaking out than I am that I don't have easy access to the metadata they're storing about me, and can't browse it locally. (In some simple open format.)
wouldn't it be easier to email the pics to the friends directly?
Posterous works because people actually intend to publish their thoughts, and they are uncomfortable with using an web interface. But in case of picture I dont think people would be comfortable with idea of sending it to a third party website, why not just add multiple emails addresses to your 'to' field. also threaded conversations make it easier to have all comments / replies in a single place.
Also facebook album with proper privacy settings is much better option.
> wouldn't it be easier to email the pics to the friends directly?
I think you're underestimating the value of organizing the information into one place. And I'm sure there are/will be other features than just picture sharing.
> I dont think people would be comfortable with idea of sending it to a third party website...facebook album with proper privacy settings is much better option
This strikes me as a tad contradictory. People wouldn't trust a third party with these pictures but facebook is somehow okay.
facebook provides a better way of organizing them via tags. and regarding trusting facebook, people are motivated to learn facebook privacy settings, since they are using it everyday.
Finally a person savvy enough to use such website/ email based service, must already be proficient with Facebook settings.
The problem with Facebook settings is not merely that they are hard to find, hard to use, and tedious to set.
The problem is that you can twiddle the knobs and dials, but you have no confidence that they are connected to anything. Or that, if connected today, they will remain connected tomorrow. Facebook has made it clear that your privacy settings are not particularly important to them. They change the settings mechanism and defaults every six months, and somehow every such change tends to start leaking information for advertising or SEO purposes. Why, it's almost as if Facebook was being run by this guy:
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
This site could work well for someone who is not that technically proficient, but had a tech-savvy friend who created a group. A layperson could easily handle visiting the site to look at other people's photos, and e-mailing pictures to the site when they want to share them.
Also, you leave out the possibility that Facebook might alter the privacy settings without warning, which could catch even a savvy user by surprise.
We are also building out features to make it much easier to upload single photos, albums, videos, as well as tag users, invite friends from FB into the group, etc... baby steps.
That's a different paradigm. It's one thing for me to, say, post a drunken picture of myself on Facebook/Fridge. It's another to actively invade my friend's inboxes. The former is the acceptable way currently (other than the social ramifications). The latter will make my friends think I'm desperate for attention.
Overall, I can't say I'll be participating in either activity though.
I agree your last comment, but I thought this service was for sharing with friends who are intimate enough to care for such pictures.
Also how is sending a link or notification about new pictures different from sending actual images. In case a group link is created.
It is unlikely that without notifications, people will actually go and browse the link for new pictures. In that case isn't it same as posting it on your Facebook profile as an album with appropriate privacy settings?
> In that case isn't it same as posting it on your Facebook profile as an album with appropriate privacy settings?
Exactly. I think the point is that FB's privacy settings are difficult for the average user to understand. FB also has a public-by-default policy, whereas The Fridge appears to be the opposite.
Although the private by default thing is a nice idea, here's the problem with the fridge's model:
What about the situation where someone in a group goes 'rogue' and invites people who other group members don't want to see their stuff? These new members will see everything already posted... I think it's an important principle that anything you post to a group should only be visible to members of the groups _at that time_... otherwise you have no real control over the info you share.
The difference is that a notification is not coming from me. It can be disabled or even filtered easily. If I send the pictures directly I am taking that control away from my friends: I don't have an unsubscribe button.
> Also facebook album with proper privacy settings is much better option.
I think this is superior due to the simplicity of the privacy settings.
The main benefit I see is for events and occasions where multiple people want to share photos. They can all be uploaded to a single location/group rather than spread out among several different facebook albums. In addition, only the users within the group can view them. You could be diligent in the privacy settings for the photos you upload yourself, but your friend might not be and the photos could still be viewed by mutual acquaintances.
The same reason why people use facebook and don't just email their friends/family anymore. Having it all organized and separated from other activities is a huge benefit. I don't think too many people actually worry (or even know it's an issue) about the photos being stored on 3rd party servers being compromised.
This has great potential if I understand it correctly. One of the things facebook doesn't seem to address for me is the need to have groups of friends. I've always wanted facebook to implement the idea of "circles" (i.e. high school friends, college friends, current friends, co-workers, etc) so I could post stuff specific to that circle of friends rather than blasting all of my FB friends, which may include all of those groups.
Maybe this feature is on the horizon in facebook, or maybe something like this new service will address it, or both. FB seems to be pretty good at quickly copying features that other services provide that are popular and align well with the whole social graph (e.g. twitter, foursquare).
I played with thefridge a bit just to try it out and it seems very alpha: it basically didn't work for me at all. It seems many features require email verification and although I followed the email link, I exited out of the password prompt and wasn't able to do much.
> what's to stop someone in your trusted group from leaking the pictures?
The problem of keeping secrets and whom to trust is not a new problem. It's a social problem, not a technical problem. The technology just makes the fallout of a broken confidence worse, that's all.
Why are those people in your trusted group, then? It's hard to force things to be private with technology when sharing with people is involved. At the end of the day, you just have to make expectations clear and then rely on trust.
It would be nice to add the ability to install open social apps. I'd like to add my own custom Gmap application. Will fridge have any integration capability with open social standards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial ?
Yes. we are currently developing our API that will support customization of groups as well as the ability to take your Fridge groups with you with an iphone app being one of the first uses.
To what standard we integrate with we aren't sure yet. We know it won't be FB connect...!
This is genius. It provides one of the killer apps of Google Wave -- planning a trip with friends and sharing the photos afterwards -- but without all the extra cruft Wave added (new logins, no email integration, threading, branching and histories).
I've signed up and created a couple of groups. Here's my thoughts and feedback after exploring what I could find:
1. Need a favicon. In the expectation that I'll use the service, I added it to my bookmarks bar - where it shows up as the default icon. d'oh!
2. Notification on new posts is great! I'd also like the option to subscribe to new comments as well. Two levels: 1) an option to automatically subscribe to comments for each new post, and 2) an option on each post to subscribe to that post. I would use the former; but most would probably like the latter to subscribe to the occasional interesting post. Also, 3) if both above options were implemented, an option to unsubscribe from new commenta made to a post (that would over-ride the global subscription comments - so I could opt-out of a post I had no interest in)
3. UI when uploading a pic could use some work. I'm not sure what you can detect, but I assume you can know how many files you're getting - at a bare minimum, "Uploading $num of $total..." would be a help.
4. Youtube videos are only embedded when the URL is the entirety of the post. Took me a few tries to figure that out... Perhaps a button like "Add a Youtube video" that, when clicked, becomes a text box to paste the URL into with a "Post" button on that...
5. Similarly - it looks to me like pictures upload as a separate post - so instead of clicking in the post field, then clicking 'add pictures' - maybe that should be separated out like the Youtube button idea above - an "add pictures" button (or separate function somewhere easy to find, but separate from a text post). Well, could even have tabbed submission - chosing text or pics or youtube...
6. Profile pics need a little work: looks like it makes the largest square it can from the picture, starting at top-left, and cuts off the rest of the picture. All thumbnails seem to do this, which is a little odd. Might be better to at least center the square in the cropped dimension... On the profile pic: Being able to drag the image to set what part of the image was displayed for the profile pic would be awesome, and UI-light, I'd think.
7. Per a suggestion below, I set up an "HN" group - for anyone interested: http://www.frid.ge/?ginvitation=3kharhhlv8owo4wgk0wwo4kcc - I note that the email address to send is at "hn@" - which is great. To test, I set up another group also called "HN", and its email is "hn1@" - which means this is extraordinarily easy for spammers to guess... certainly to send to a@, b@, c@ etc... Also, when I changed the name of the group and created another "HN" - it got the "hn1@" email - meaning if the name is changed and someone has the old addy in their address book and someone else uses the name.......... I don't see how this can end well, even if I like the email feature itself.
I like the cleanliness of the interface. I like the ease of switching between the groups I created.
1. doh. get one up asap (little launch things we overlooked thanks!)
2. we are working on a bit more custom notification settings. right now they default to post ON but you can always turn them off for specific group. you get notifications if someone comments on your post as well as if you have commented on something and there is follow up. the idea of subscribing to a post is great. on the list!
3. yes, we have a new photo upload interface coming out soon. know that it is not ideal!
4. youtube (and vimeo) native URLs are supported if you don't add any text. if you do it is just the video (like FB actually) however we do let use the embed code to post videos inline and add comments before or after. works for any video service as well as any flash embed.
5. see 3. but yes. coming soon!
6. absolutely. we are working on the whole photo experience one step at a time.
7. well for the dedicated email addresses for each group you have to be a Member of each group in order to post to that group. we check the sender email with the group members so people who aren't members but just try to spam all the groups won't be able to.
Thanks! We are working on rolling out a much easier to use and "polished" design that keeps the simplicity but fixes alot of these UI issues.
As you continue to use it would love any feedback, comments, or concerns. cheers!
Really? Post it on the Fridge. Put it on the Fridge. Like the fridge at home growing up where you mom would put gold stars on your homework, shopping list, pictures of weddings, messages? There is a fridge in every house, dorm, frat, apartment and it is usually the one place where stuff is posted and shared for everyone but specifically for that group.
A friend who once visited me took pictures from in my apartment (I live on a high floor in downtown Manhattan, nice view) which he then posted on his blog!!!
I asked him to kill it (would you like if I posted pics of your bedroom for the world to see?)
People don't like to accept but email and email lists are still the fundamental ways people collaborate on important and personal matters. Even though Yahoo and Google groups are not being talked about much, it wouldn't hurt if someone innovate on top of those same old method of communication.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if data (email) is pushed to the user or user is pushed to the date (website). What matters is the quality and integrity of the content and communication platform. If people feel comfortable using your service, if your service is easy enough for them to use, you win.
agreed and that is what we are trying to build. something that is a super simple execution of a core notion and build out from there. email is great for direct communication but social conversation naturally branches and add in lots of folks it gets unmanageable to track.
soon we are going to integrate tighter into email so people can have the convenience of replying via email if they want but also to be able to go to the site for a richer experience.
It's funny, google is trying to create a new social network (buzz, orkut, wave, ...) and they have Google Groups that are real communities (spam appart) that only need some care.