Tech Break

Wanted to share or transfer files to other people, but oculdn’t find your trusty flash drive? Or were said files pretty sall anyway, but generally not a good idea to e-mail?

Enter drop.io. Put in the URL you want your “drop” to be placed at (drop.io/something), select the files you want to upload, then hit the big red “drop it” button. No signup needed, and each drop can be up to 100MB in size for free. For-pay services are somewhat less attractive; $10 gets you one drop-GB-year and things go up from there. When you consider the fact that drop.io is running off of Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services, you’re looking at a steep premium for sharing convenience, but the extra space and dead-simple UI may be worth it to someone.P Plus, if you want to game the system, drop.io doesnt charge for data transfer, so theoretically if you upload a 1GB file and it’s downloaded five times, you’re goming out ahead versus going direct to Amazon.

The bottom line: drop.io is dead easy and dang useful. I personally use the service once or twice a week, and that service was how my C++ Programming Concepts team shared files last semester. Text message notifications let us know when files were uploaded, and no email trail to get tangled in. Gotta love Web 2.0, whether its innovations are technical, user-focused or both. Seems like drop.io is in the third category.