A Deep Dive Into Drop.io
Drop.io is a new solution for lightweight web collaboration based on some simple, but charmingly subtle premises.The company is based in NYC, and has raised some serious money from Jed Katz (DFJ Gotham), Stuart Ellman (RRE Ventures), and Andrew Weinrich, and has some heavyweights on their advisory board, like Nicholas Negroponte. I hope to interview the CEO, Sam Lessin, sometime in the next few months.
[Full disclosure: I am a co-founder and architect of Workstreamer, which I believe to be a competitor of Drop.io. Still, I am trying to write this from the perspective of a hypothetical user, not as a competitor.]
A Deep Dive Into Drop.io
The core motivation for Drop.io is file sharing, and it performs that job. However, the subordinate influence on Drop.io feels more like Tumblr and Soup.io, which are newly socialized takes on blogging.
Like these other examples of new thinking in blogging tools, Drop.io's user experience is organized around various types of posts that can be created, which include 'files' (like PDFs, images, audio, Word docs, or Powerpoint slideshows), 'notes' (blog-like posts, more or less), and 'links' (URLs). Here's a 'Drop' I created for purposes of demonstration:
This drop is entitled 'stoweboyd01', and the URL associated with it is 'wwww.drop.io/stoweboyd01'. The drop is displayed here in the 'blog' view, where posts are presented in reverse chronological order. The 'media' view aggregates posts by type, the 'system' view orders alphabetically, and the 'piclens' view provides a lightbox style of presentation, suitable for drops with lots of images. I confess, I haven't figured out exactly how to use the piclens view, since it involves a third-party Firefox plugin, and provides a drastically different user experience, including taking over the entire screen on my Mac so I couldn't even figure out how to get a screenshot of it.
As part of the type model underlying Drop.io, the various types of posts, when opened through Ajaxy controls, have very different presentations. Notes look like blog posts, and include a comment thread. Links are like bookmarks. Various types of files have different presentations. Here's an audio file, which includes controls to play the audio:
Here's a Powerpoint, which includes an integration with the Scribe slide player:
Note that this would allow collaborators to use a drop for lightweight web presentations. The designers seemed to have this sort of use in mind when they included a private conference call number into every drop, as shown in the 'Drop Details' box, below:
Note: Although Drop.io is ostensibly geared to file sharing -- as these various media examples show -- Drop.io has some strange gaps in its functionality. In particular, there is no versioning of files, so a group of collaborators making revisions to a shared file would have to upload a series of copies instead of a single versioned object. I experimented with uploading large files -- a 200+ MB video interview -- and aside from an Ajaxy progress bar, there were no specific capabilities to make large file transfer easier. I contrast this with a solution like BoxCloud, and Drop.io is harder to use. Here's the upload of that large file:
Note the odd truncation on the right, which appeared every time I used the Ajax uploader. It cuts off the ETA information (is it minutes or hours?) and once the progress bar reaches the edge, since there is no percentage anywhere, the user is left wondering if the uploading is complete. The HTML uploader gave no feedback whatesoever, however, although it worked on small files, at least.
Note also that large file uploads are the core of the business model, since users wanting to upload more than 100MB have to sign up for a premium account. In this example, I signed up for 1G of storage for $10 per year.
The other aspects of the Drop Details show that the designers envision an identity for each drop, involving URL, vCard information (to be easily copied into address books, etc.), a PDF suitable to print business cards from the vCard info, and the ability to have every drop receive email, voicemail, and faxes! In the first screenshot, you can see a voicemail that I associated with this drop, which plays like an other audio file. I haven't played with the fax capability, but the voicemail and email work in obvious ways (although the formatting of the email is iffy).
Each drop has its own RSS feed, as well as options for other sorts of notifications:
The Twitter integration seems to have sparked some API concerns for the Drop.io engineers, since the API requires Drop.io to send Twitter username and login as unencrypted text in order to alert the user via tweet. I tested it and it seems to work (see below):
I think they should redesign this integration, and create a system where Drop.io would send direct messages or perhaps @ messages to the user instead of posting as the user. Alternatively, they could create their own desktop client (a la Twhirl), and allow users to avoid the Twitter route altogether. Or simply collaborate with Seesmic to get Drop.io listed as an 'account' -- like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Friendfeed -- so that users could provide a list of drops that they would like to monitor.
Based on my work experience, setting up email notifications seems easiest, since many competitive tools -- Basecamp, GoPlan, and Huddle, for example -- use that as a baseline.
As part of its simplicity, Drop.io does not require user IDs. However, a password can be associated with a drop, and collaborators can be invited by email to participate, and they or the drop creator can associate email addresses for notification purposes. The creator of a drop must create a password to access administrative functions, like assigning a general password to the drop, setting access controls for others (read only, read and write, read, write, and delete), and managing the drop as whole, including deletion. But Drop.io does not ask for a login, just the password.
The biggest headache I have had with Drop.io is related to this model. They have a pernicious bug, that the support staff says they are working on, madly. Basically, whenever you log into a second drop, you have to log in again -- which matches their model of no ID. But when you return to the still open first project, you have to log in again, because the second log in logs you out of the first, without telling you. And when you log back into the first, Drop.io logs you out of the second, again without telling you. This is seriously annoying if you are trying to use two or three on various projects in parallel. They state that this mess should be remedied quickly, however.
One side effect of having no IDs is that users have to include their names when writing notes or comments, which could lead to real confusion. I would suggest that they allow optional self-identification via email address for those that would like to, which would mean that posts and comments could be automatically annotated with the user's identity. But this starts to hint that the ID-less model has some gaps.
As one facet of the lightweight collaboration model, drops are envisioned as being temporary. One of the basic settings involves the point at which the drop should self-destruct, with parameters involving a specific period after last access (like 'one year after last access') or a certain period of time (like 'one month'). The idea is that someone might create a drop, upload a bunch of files, invite some collaborators to look and discuss those files -- blueprints, design docs, a business plan, whatever -- and then delete the drop explicitly, or implicitly after some period of no access by any collaborators. Note that one benefit of the premium plan is that drops can have longer lifetimes, like three years after last access. Also note that each drop can be compressed into a zip file, and downloaded, after which it can be unzipped.
Because there is no user ID, there is no 'dashboard' involving the collection of all drops that I have created or been invited to. However, there is a Firefox plugin that (in principle) allows very active users to manage drop bookmarks easily, and to drop files onto them without opening their webpages. However, I have not been able to get the plugin to work, even when I uninstalled all my other plugins and ran it on its own. Without something like this plugin, it could be very easy to forget the names of drops, and lose track of them. But since they are intended to be ephemeral -- used for an activity and then deleted -- maybe that's ok. Personally, if I were to use Drop.io much, I would create a drop with links to all my drops (maybe a premium option? To add a newly created drop as a link to some other drop?).
Final Thoughts
Drop.io is being spun as a super and simple file sharing tool, but it really is more of a competitor to solutions like Basecamp, which I characterize as a social media-based project collaboration solution, or Backpack, which is more of a small group or personal information manager.
Unlike these competitors, Drop.io does not require user IDs offering a simpler on ramp to sharing and commenting on shared files or notes. However, Drop.io shares some basic premises with these products, for example, creating a new drop for every project -- or even short term activities in the context of projects.
A final observation: I find it odd that Drop.io does not include tasks as a basic type. It seems an odd omission when sharing of files is so often one ticky mark in a list of things to do for some joint project with dispersed collaborators. I sense that Drop.io is very much a work in progress, and we might see major revisions in design, functionality, and scope in the upcoming weeks and months.
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