Friend: “This site, 7dots.com, reminded me of your hilarious blog post about 42nouns.com. Maybe these guys read your post, too, and decided to act quickly so they can beat you to the punch :-)”
JH: “Nice one… I think all this “<integer><noun>.com” nonsense is the new ‘eBusiness’ (<thelettere><noun> in Backus Naur Form). The only real difference I see is that most folks’ 401Ks aren’t at risk this time.”
JH: “Kidding aside, though… I don’t think I’ll trust any of these web sites with my data just yet (that includes Basecamp, Backpack, or even 7dots, whatever it is that it’ll be.) Although I’m sure each of the sites are worthy of trust. Give me a plain old account from a trusted ISP or my own server in my basement, secure access (via either SSH or HTTPS), and a GTD Tiddly Wiki and I’m good to go. However, I’m probably not the target market for most of these Web 2.0 services.”
Haven’t read your “42nouns.com” post before but did find it funny. As for what we’re trying to do – we simply started making an app that was extremely useful for ourselves and decided it would be something other people could find useful.
7dots is essencially a password management system. With all the different accounts (FTP, MySQL, websites, etc…) I have, it’s hard to keep track of them all.
As for the name – sure, it’s silly but it comes because (1) it was available for purchase and because (2) 7 is the amount of information most people can remember at one time without messing up the numbers (this is why American phone numbers are 7 digits). The dots represents the dots that come up when you put in information into a password field.
On another note: Everyone has their own system of managing their information, we’re just offering one that works for us and hopefully others will find it useful as well :-)
Link | December 6th, 2005 at 10:21 pm
Hi, Aaron,
You’ll have to build an incredible amount of trust and credibility to prove that my passwords are safe on your site. But even then, if your servers were hacked and my data compromised, how would I even know about it? I’m thinking this “single point of vulnerability” is part of the reason Microsoft Wallet was unsuccessful. But maybe the point is that one shouldn’t store passwords to banking sites on 7dots, but it would be fine to store passwords to slashdot, digg, flickr, and other sites that don’t hold sensitive data. (If hackers compromised a list of flickr id/password… who cares!)
With that said… I do understand how fun it is to come up with an idea and hack away furiously ’til it’s ready to release. I wish you all the best. – Jason
Link | December 8th, 2005 at 3:51 pm