Dropbox…. is good!
I finally got a Dropbox invite from Sean ( of ping.fm fame, which I will talk more about when I get to my post about the Micro-blog & Social Networking ).
Dropbox in simple terms is a folder sync utility. What makes it unique is that it cross platform, Mac OS and Windows, with Linux support close behind. It has some very slick features that you don’t find in ordinary folder sync utilities. It allows you to share folders across the internet, it keeps backups of changes, allows for resurrecting of deleted files and it provides direct links to folders or individual files that you can email or IM quickly. It uses some smart technology to transfer only the parts of the files that have been changed or updated thus saving bandwidth and making the syncing process faster. It also has a super simple photo sharing, you can put pictures in the Photos folder and share out individual pictures or entire folders and it creates a gallery that is viewable in a web browser. So far I am really happy with the performance and at 2GB the storage is adequate for documents and images. I am willing to bet when they go public this will be the free version and that you will be able to purchase more space and possibly some other collaboration features.
The one thing that is not mentioned in the Dropbox video is what happens if two people have opened the same file and are editing it at the same time. I had to try it to see what would happen, and just to cause even more confusion I saved the files from each computer at the same time ( or as close to the same time as possible ). To my surprise the system didn’t even blink, it saved the version I updated on my Mac and it saved the version I updated on my PC, the system did tag the PC version as a conflicted copy so that I could see the difference. I would guess that this is not going to be a major issue for most people as they would each do their revisions one at a time.
Edit (July 08, 2008) I have 5 Dropbox Invites for the 1st 5 people who leave me a comment telling me why they would like to use Dropbox.
Edit (July 09, 2008) You must also leave me an email address to send your invite to.
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