What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook.
drop.io was widely acclaimed as the simple file sharing mechanisms we all needed. It resolutely solved the problem that everyone with a computer and a network connection has known at one time or another: how to share files too cumbersome for email, without resorting to techno-geekery like ftp and such. And it worked. Beautifully.
But it doesn't work anymore.
Goodbye drop.io! You were an amazing service. One of the best and brightest of the Class of Web 2.0. You made things simple. You solved a real, pressing problem.
Unfortunately, that's not what I'll remember you for now.
Instead, it will be for brewing a thunderstorm of concern over the very dependability of cloud services, as John C. Dvorak went to town on in his column.
And for teaching us that it's true - startup founders really don't give a toss for their customers if they can get a sweet deal and a plum job with one of the heavyweights instead.
And for once again propelling Facebook into the privacy-conspiracy-theory limelight. Sure, "no data will be transferred to Facebook", but they put you out of business and bought "most of [your] technology and assets", right? So will we be surprised when Facebook takes aim to lure it's unsuspecting users into sharing pretty much anything and everything - private, commercially confidential, and otherwise - using Facebook?
Well, I guess drop.io does really deserve our thanks for that last point, if anyone cares to notice.
The very best news—for anyone who can't imagine life without drop.io—is that there is another exceptional product out there called Dropbox that can handle most team sharing needs in addition to looking after your personal documents.That's not a paid advertisement or anything. I simply use Dropbox everyday and just love it. I wouldn't be exaggerating to say it's probably improved the way I work more than anything even the folks in Redmond or Cupertino have shipped in recent memory.
Blogarhythm: Rock Rock (till you drop) .. Def Leppard
