This is the new Dropio interface with a chat pop-up at the bottom.
(Credit: Dropio)When Facebook announced that its news feed would turn into a real-time "stream" of updates and media, it became clear that the Twitter-like model of fast-moving information flow was gaining a real foothold in the dot-com world.
Now, file-sharing service Dropio has opted to turn its "drops"--the pages where people can drag and drop any number of multimedia files and then password-protect them--into streams optimized for collaborative work. If you're working in one of them, it updates instantly for all users.
There's also a new feature, much like in Google Docs, Zoho, and other collaboration tools, which lets all members looking at a given "drop" chat with one another. Dropio has also turned on access to drops from third-party chat clients with Jabber support, like Adium and Pidgin.
But founder and CEO Sam Lessin said that he doesn't see the collaboration-focused new development as bringing Dropio, which turned on Twitter support last summer, in competition with the Web's numerous productivity-suite applications.
"We're still not interested in, and we're not competing in the 'let's open up a document and edit it together in real time' space," Lessin said to CNET News. "I've yet to see...a normal workflow where you want to do that. The workflow for us is much more along the lines of opening up a pipe between 15 people who are collaborating or 100 people who are in a conference audience and let them collaborate around the event."
A more direct competitor, he said, would be the 37Signals product Campfire.
A look at the new Dropio home page.
(Credit: Dropio)Dropio, a file-sharing start-up that lets you easily toss anything from photos to phone calls in a "drop" (kind of like a virtual storage cabinet), has launched a new look.
The redesign makes the site look a little slicker, and certainly accentuates Dropio's "easy to use" mantra. It's also clearly a consumer-oriented product now--in comparison, the old design looks like a back-end content management system. That's good, because the company hopes to appeal to Luddites as well as techies. (For a business model, Dropio offers premium accounts that get rid of the 100MB free account storage limit.)
Feature-wise, it's pretty much the same, but Dropio's team has said that it's "about a thousand times more customizable and useful" thanks to a newly reorganized dashboard. They also say that the speed of the site should also be a notch higher.
Remember when Facebook was just a way to "poke" that kid who sat in front of you in macroeconomics class? Yeah, that was a long time ago. Rev2 reported on Sunday that technobabble on the Facebook Developer Wiki may be hinting that the "social utility" wants to expand into data storage.
So far, this appears to only apply to developers who have created applications on the Facebook Platform and have until this point provided their own data storage for the apps. A Facebook data storage plan would allow them to rent or purchase storage (or perhaps, at least in a beta form, get some for free) from Facebook instead, which could potentially be more economical for some app developers.
But if it proves successful, who knows? Facebook might be headed into Google Drive territory.
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