A few days ago I received an invite from the team at www.getdropbox.com. I had totally forgotten that a few months or weeks I signed up to be one of their beta testers. So the invite arrived. Of course I was totally no idea what exactly the software did so I again took at look at their video on their home page. And wow, did I get excited. And that doesn’t happen to often.
I won’t explain the whole features since their video which is only a few minutes long does a great job explaining how drop box works.
The company plan on charging for their software, but right now you get 2.0 gigs of free space as a beta tester. The awesome thing about dropbox is that is works just like plain folder except with cooler features. To start off you download the software, then you have to link it to your account( you create a dropbox account). When your dropbox account you can link computers to your account. The reason for linking seems to be the following. Your email and password for your account provide the necessary information to keep track of whatfiles you have in your dropbox folder, since there is also in online interface where you can acess files online.
The neat thing lies in the following. So your dropbox folder functions just like a folder. Its sorta like a shared folder. So say you have three computers. Laptop at home, desktop at home and work pc. All in different locations. With drop box you install the software and link the accounts. All three computers will have a folder called My Dropbox inside My documents folder. The awesomness lies in that when you put any file in any of the My Dropbox folder in any of the computers, those changes to that folder migrate to the other computers. So say in my home desktop computer I put 3 pictures. Those 3 pictures will magically appear in the My Dropbox folder of all the other computers. Is not that awesome. So its sorta like shared folder in a windows home or office network, but here you can be in different part of the world, no need to be in same physical network. So that is only one the kool things about getdropbox.
Another extremely cool thing is the following. Say I wanted to show someone a picture briefly. If I send them a picture of an attachment they will have record of it forever. What if I just want them to see it for a second. Well since the world wide web is ment to be public it is very hard to do that, but you can come close if the other person is not too computer savvy. My Dropbox folder comes with a handy Public folder. You can put any thing inside this folder and anythign that you put inside this folder has a public url. So you can copy that url and send it to someone. When they are done with the link, just delete the file in the folder and that file, picture will no longer be visible.
Lastly, you can share folder with friends. Say you have a folder of picture you want to share with family member but not your friends. You can set to share certain folder by email invitation. So when your family members get their invite and create their account , right inside their drop box they will see that folder you shared and none of your other drop box files. So now you can add pictures to that folder and whomever you shared it with, will view all changes. Which is very vey neat. This way you can share folder with diferent sets of friends.
I have a few invites… so if you want to give it a try send me a comment with your e-mail.