When I first heard of filepicker.io I thought it was a stupid idea. File uploads aren't hard to do, after all, so why pay a third party service for it? However, used Filepicker at the NY eCommerce Hackathon recently because we needed to implement file uploads in a hurry and was very impressed with it.
Took about 5 minutes to get image uploads enabled in our web app, including allowing people to take pictures directly from a webcam. No screwing around with file POSTs, sanitizing, storage, CDNs etc.
But that's exactly it - if you are in a hurry, you'd be more willing to create a dependency on 3rd party and take on the risks that you can avoid otherwise. I'm sure there is a market for filepicker-like webapp component services, I just suspect that their user base is going to be highly transient (edit - or hard to monetize on).
Comments
When I first heard of filepicker.io I thought it was a stupid idea. File uploads aren't hard to do, after all, so why pay a third party service for it? However, used Filepicker at the NY eCommerce Hackathon recently because we needed to implement file uploads in a hurry and was very impressed with it.
Took about 5 minutes to get image uploads enabled in our web app, including allowing people to take pictures directly from a webcam. No screwing around with file POSTs, sanitizing, storage, CDNs etc.
Looking forward to using it in a real project.
> ... in a hurry
But that's exactly it - if you are in a hurry, you'd be more willing to create a dependency on 3rd party and take on the risks that you can avoid otherwise. I'm sure there is a market for filepicker-like webapp component services, I just suspect that their user base is going to be highly transient (edit - or hard to monetize on).