I like the value proposition of being private by default.
With a kid on the way, I expect to share lot of pics and videos to close family members and I am in search of a proper (and private) solution to this.
However, before I commit to any service these days, I always verify what is the company's policy and offering for user's private data.
Do they allow you to easily export/download your personal data?
Unfortunately, with Everyme, they have not mentioned anything about this on their site.
We just added data export to our mobile apps. You totally own everything you share, and you can request an archive at any time with all of your data (full-resolution photos, stories, circles etc.). We also automatically send you an archive of all your data if you delete your account, before it's destroyed.
It's very important to us that users feel comfortable sharing in Everyme.
I'm considering creating a page where I own the space and the domain, but I put in just enough Facebook integration so that only people who are logged in to Facebook and are my friends can see it, and they can comment and Like photos as they please, but the photos themselves aren't in any Facebook server.
This way the social interaction around photos are still available, but I keep the photos instead of handing Facebook copies of it.
This seems like a great idea. I wonder if we can create website we can host on our own server so that we retain control of the main data but connect it to the Facebook API so that our friends can connect and interact with it.
Disclaimer: I work at Facebook. I share photos and videos of my kid in a secret FB group where I have to approve membership. It has worked pretty well, I'd encourage you to try it!
Everyme is an app that works REALLY well on all platforms for your purposes, not just pretty well. I would encourage you to give it a try. You might like it better.
I've used the Facebook secret groups feature and found it sufficient. Could you elaborate on what non-trivial benefits you offer over those? As far as privacy from the provider, it seems like I would have to trust you instead of Facebook, which from my point of view isn't a huge net gain.
Where to begin - first, our apps perform at least 30x better. Facebook mobile apps sometimes lag for 30 seconds or more loading new content, ours is instantaneous. Our app was natively built for all platforms. Second, we are backwards compatible with email and text. I think FB might handle email replies as well but text is huge on mobile and is a big deal for our users. Third, we can build your groups automatically for you with Magic Circles. Fourth, we are hooked into all major social networks and are constantly scanning for interesting events occurring in your life. When we find those events, we post them to your Circles for you (if you have the setting turned on) - this takes the effort out of sharing. There's more but I encourage you to try the app and see for yourself how much better it is.
Feature wise FB may be ok, but from the user experience perspective they have failed to offer anything remotely attractive on the mobile. This is what makes apps like Path and Everyme attractive, they were designed with mobile in mind.
Plus their mobile platform straight up sucks. It takes ages for mine to load (on iphone 3gs) on wifi or 3g. Even then, some of its capabilities are hobbled. I was trying to do something the other day (i dont remember what), but was very frustrated at not being able to do it.
Yeah sorry, but I would never trust Facebook with anything private. One example: I used lists for years, selectively shared data with different people. One day Facebook gets Google+ envy and now the names of the lists I shared with is public. Imagine all the people with lists labelled "hot girls" or similar? An absolute violation of privacy.
There was the recent bug that allowed viewing of personal photos via the report dialog. There have been problems with application tokens allowing data to be compromised. And Facebook has a history of resetting privacy settings when it suits them.
How about when smart lists came out? I already had a Family list, so I followed the instructions and merged it with the new smart list. Then I found out that adding people to that smart list sent them a request to confirm family relationship. So I had to create a new list (I appended a dash) and move everyone to that. The thousands of posts I'd tagged hiding or showing family were now visible or hidden incorrectly, and I just about killed my account in despair.
If you're smart enough to work at Facebook, you should be smart enough not to trust your data to that company.
Sorry for ranting. I'm just incredulous at the whole idea.
Well, if I create secret groups and add my friends and others add me to their secret groups, I will be in about 50 secret groups - which doesn't make sense. Also, managing groups, like circles in very cumbersome. That's where apps like Path & Pair help a lot.
That's an interesting idea. I am not sure if it's possible to do that and keep the same level of performance, features, and usability that we offer. If it was, I would certainly be open to it.
Quick note: why not integrate with the major mail providers to get my address book from there instead of making me enter them one by one? You had me on board until that screen showed up..
We are working on that for web (which is in beta), I'm assuming that's what you are mentioning. Our backend is ready to do Google Contacts and Yahoo, but haven't had time to wire up the front-end. If you download our app for Android or iPhone, you can use the address book there and create Magic Circles.
TwoDeg (for Two Degrees) is a proof-of-concept (just for fun, not profit) social network that allows you to create ad-hoc channels (akin to circles) to communicate and share within smaller groups. We took the private-by-default approach as well. Moreover, we make the reach/extent of every post clear to the user by listing the people who can see it.
We used a combination of symmetric key and public/private key encryption in JavaScript to encrypt the information in the browser (I know the whole argument about how insecure that is - this is just proof-of-concept). Only you or your friends (or the people you share a post with) have the keys to decrypt the information. We, as the service provider, just move around encrypted data.
We don't have data export functionality, but that is something we could easily add.
this is exactly what we used first PoolParty, then whatsapp and now G+ for. Its not like everyme is the only one, but once everyone got on board for g+, sharing of everything, along with scheduling live video became easier.
With a kid on the way, I expect to share lot of pics and videos to close family members and I am in search of a proper (and private) solution to this.
However, before I commit to any service these days, I always verify what is the company's policy and offering for user's private data. Do they allow you to easily export/download your personal data?
Unfortunately, with Everyme, they have not mentioned anything about this on their site.