Interview with the developers of Floomby

I actively use the service Floomby.Ru , he immediately won my love. After several months, I decided to ask a couple of questions to the service development team, which consists of two people - from Alexander Katasonov and Andrey Ivanichenko.

And on the “ About the Project ” page you can watch a video showing how this all works.

Reference:

Using the floomby service, you can easily publish screenshots of the screen or any part of it on the Web, all this is done in two clicks, no graphic editors and image-hosting sites. It is also possible to publish files and folders. From the pleasant - although the program is only for Windows - under wine It works, albeit not always stable - but in general it is just fine.

Do you plan to fasten to the service the possibility of registering, publishing files on behalf of the user, well, and a beautiful RSS feed, both general and personally?
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Yes. Right now we are developing a user interface, you can register and manage your screenshots, as well as other files directly through the web interface. Users will be able to connect their Floomby Agent (new version) to their account and the entire publication will be conducted on behalf of a specific user, also the new version will be able to work like the old one without registration. Plus, a small gift is planned for vkontakte users, but for now we will not talk. :) RSS feed will be.

Personally, I use the floomby client through wine in ubuntu - the program works, but there are glitches, sometimes it crashes, well, I eat a little more memory. Do you plan to create clients for alternative operating systems, or plug-ins for browsers?

Initially, we planned the client only for Windows because we ourselves were users of this OS and practically did not use others. We were pleasantly surprised when some of our users began to write that they have Flumby running under Wine on Linux.

Alexander: “I recently bought a MacBook and I can say I became a“ fan ”of the Mac OS :-), so it’s possible that the agent will be ported to Mac. Despite the fact that there are other good programs for Mac, I do not have the flumby anyway. Now I use Skitch. The program is good, but too cumbersome for my simple tasks. I would also like to please the users of the Linux system, at least in the future plans there is such a task. ”

How was the idea of ​​such a service born? Did anything serve as a prototype?

The idea was born spontaneously. It is difficult to say what exactly preceded its appearance, but the factors, as I recall now, were: We were constantly inventing something, we wanted to create our own Internet startup. Somehow communicating in Skype, we terribly lacked the opportunity to show something from the screen to each other. And here it was decided! You need to make a simple program that will take a screenshot of the screen and publish it on the Internet. We conducted a little analysis and found an interesting Jingproject service. Jing is beautiful, convenient and has a ton of features (it’s not without reason that a company that has been doing screenshots for more than 10 years) has been developing, but it consumes a lot of RAM and requires the installation of the .NET Framework. And you decided to correct the situation by creating a floomby, which is why you have the opportunity to use Floomby, even under Linux. :)

Alexander and Andrei, tell us briefly about yourself, literally by paragraph. Is there only you in the development team, or is there anyone else?

The service is developed only by us, the design ordered. The guys from JumpIdea also helped us with tips on promoting and developing new functionality, for which we are very grateful.

We are 25 years old.

We both studied at the Novosibirsk State University at FIT, Alexander graduated in 2005 and Andrei in 2006. Then we worked together as programmers in one firm. In 2007, they went to work in different countries: Alexander to Germany (Munich), Andrey to the Netherlands (Amsterdam). Floomby started doing while already abroad.

Alexander is a specialist in C / C ++ / WIN API and development of Desktop applications for Windows. Floomby Agent is his handiwork.

Andrey is an expert in WEB technologies, in particular .NET and Java. The server part on it.
Will there ever be an opportunity to just quickly and accurately take a screenshot (as it is happening now), but not publish it on the net?

Yes. Undoubtedly this is one of the hottest issues that requires implementation.

Development, as I see, is not yet commercial? Are you going to monetize? How? If I offer a cool idea of ​​monetization - how much interest will you give?

Flower, unfortunately, from the category of those projects that do not have any business model under its foundation. Now the project does not make money and is supported by its own efforts and financial investments. We are going to monetize since the idea itself appeared, but we have not decided how to monetize. So far, only ideas. :-)

An idea always needs to be tested by time and implementation. If you help (not in words, but in deed of course) to raise the project to the level when it will bring money, you are always ready to discuss the percentages.

Do you plan to develop the product before shooting short video clips? Or (probably, this idea was already) creating a series of screenshots, and creating a beautiful presentation from them on the site, for example, as an instruction for installing and configuring software?

All these ideas were planned and some are planned so far. But there are two problems that force us to abandon some plans and move on to others: 1. Economic unreasonableness and 2. Practical inexpediency. Ie, on the one hand, each new functional on which the Nth amount of time will be spent should increase (at least in the plans) the profitability of the project. On the other hand, each new feature should not turn flumb into a combine that can do everything, but most people need only take a screenshot from it and drop it into ICQ or insert it into a blog. Therefore, now we approach any ideas and functional extensions with great attention and caution. More than once this resulted in many hours of controversy :-)

Each new feature that will be added to Flumbi will mean for us at least: in the near future, it will raise the project’s revenue and most of our users need it. But it is very likely that in order to avoid the specified problems we will follow the path of development of parallel projects designed for certain circles of users and their specific needs (for example, such as Floomby Video or Floomby Presentations) and perhaps this will be the key to monetization :-) ”

Do you plan to teach the program to publish the screenshots to popular photo hosting?

At the moment there are no such plans. But time will tell :-)

What are the plans for the development of the project?

Improving the social component of the project. Add user registration, synchronize client applications on different machines, and add features that will make sharing screenshots and files more convenient.

Do you, gentlemen, still have joint projects? And your own?

Alexander: ”There are no joint at the moment. But I hope to be soon. Own are: recently completed, finally, their first game under the iPhone. ”

Andrew: “I have my own project, I am creating a browser game. Regarding joint projects, we are constantly looking for new ideas and as soon as an idea appears that is interesting for both of us, we will not keep you waiting long :) ”

And yet, can I send your photos? :)

Yes of course, here it is :-) floomby.ru/content/sa9r15czGU