Drop.io May Put an End to the Dirtiest Three Letter Word in Digital: FTP

Way back in the bubble days, I got called to interview for a marketing job at a company that gave free online storage to users. Your box was virtually unlimited in size, the content would be preserved forever, and they had pledged never to charge for their services. Oh, and there was no advertising and no plan to add it.

Hmm.

I was new to the whole idea of a business that didn't need to make money -- I remember asking how they expected to earn cash and was told that what mattered was eyeballs, they just needed millions of users to make money. Which puzzled me, so I followed up -- but if you lose money on every user, won't you just lose...more money with more members? The answer is very memorable to me because of the tone in which it was delivered "You dinosaur..." and in its absurdity, "Well, in storage, costs are asymptotic." Which, it turned out, was an adjectivized version of asymptote, a math concept I vaguely remembered as one in which the horizontal line approached zero over time but never quite got there.

My interview was promptly ended and I am sure they found someone much more attuned to the revenue-less business model.

So when I first saw drop.io reviewed yesterday on ARSTechnica, I was a little skeptical. Storage costs money, and I could store things for free for a year.

But happily there is a very tangible, very sound revenue model at Drop.io, and for that I am thankful because this is a really cool product.

FTP is the nastiest three letter combination in digital. Why? Because they rarely work properly. You get a user name and password, input it, end up on some incomprehensible page, get bumped out after 45 seconds, and then find that the user gave you a 1X permission. So then you must call or email, tail between legs, asking for another. And so on.

With Drop.io, you get an easy peasy and secure way to share content online. The system simply asks you to create a url, upload "drop" content, choose a password if you want one, and decide how long you want your content to be stored -- one day to one year. Then share away.



Note what I didn't state in the above? What you DON'T have to enter? No PII! So they clearly aren't going to be selling your data to people or scanning your secret docs to determine the best behaviorally targeted text links to...

Oh, they do charge for larger boxes and additional features, and thank the Lord for that because then they can make money and keep this marvelous service going. You get 100MB free, and then $10 a year per gig. Reasonable in my book.

From a UI standpoint it is a dream. It's like two clicks and you're there. And if you want to share 500 files, you just control click them all and "drop" them all at once. Not 1 by 1.

Right now I pay about $100 a year for a "MyFileFolder" site that offers similar benefits though with a somewhat less convenient management system. But when that expires, you better believe I'll be dropping it. Arr Arr.

Drop what you're doing - oh, sorry, I was going to get really punny. And punny ain't funny. But Drop.io is a goodie.

And FYI, if you are Mr(s) Curious as I am, the .io suffix is the code reserved for British Indian Ocean Territory. Think...Diego Garcia.



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