we get really excited when people do cool stuff with our API - Carmen Delessio's DroidDrop is a perfect example of this....

he says 'DrodDrop Remote logging service gives Android Developers the ability to log data from their applications to a drop on drop.io - we say 'cool'

more from Carmen on is blog at talkingandroid.com

We are thrilled to announce the release of the drop.io outlook plugin, which makes it dead simple to attach up to 100 MB of files to emails for free (and up to several GB as a premium service).  GET IT HERE



For senders, it works a lot like our yahoo mail integration.  Just open an email normally, click 'attach' and select up to 100 MB of files (or more).  drop.io handles everything else

For recipients, it works a lot like how google gmail handles attachments...  you can see web previews of your files or play them directly off the web, but if you want or need the originals, go for it.

For business users, we even added in some collaboration bells and whistles - like inserting  private conference call numbers into your emails in one click.




Some Key Points:

-  no more email file attachment limits (for senders or receivers)
-  keeps inboxes clean and fast...  no waiting for long downloads
-  with our conversion farm, you can view all rich media attachments right on the web, without downloading them
-  convenient thumbnails of all media placed right in your email
-  with 'premium' service, you can enable deep customizations, permissions (like view only), adjust expiration, and keep a central catalog of all the attachments sent by you/your organization

Built with our public API during the first drop.io hackathon this app was the winner of the first drop.io internal team hackaton on our public API in a matter of a few hours.  Congrats to Mike Singleton on the win...   we will be building more of these types of integrations -- and you can as well in the language of your choice at http://dev.drop.io -- just another awesome way drop.io facilitates modern 'content' in the context of conversations

 

With web apps like drop.io, there are a lot of moving parts and occasionally one will act up. This was the case with setting a filter in Gmail to forward e-mails to a drop's custom e-mail address. 

Gmail's filter/forward feature is very useful and ridiculously easy-to-set up (DISCLOSURE: We use Gmail in-house and love it) and when combined with drop.io's inputs and outputs give users the ability to do some pretty amazing stuff.

You can, for instance, have all of your step-mother's rambling and incoherent e-mail forwards sent to a drop where they will be automatically pushed out to a Twitter feed that publicly mocks her, behind the veil of internet anonymity of course. This type of activity is a pretty crucial part of our workday.

All kidding aside, this is a great way to use Gmail and drop.io and we're glad it's fixed.

-drop.io Team

Attention developers, hobby-coders and Internet citizens alike: drop.io's API version 2.0 is now in public beta!

For the past few months our team has been working very hard to build out a more robust and fully-featured 2nd version to our API.  Our goal with this new version was to give wider access across the application and allow developers to get deeper into the stack. With the first version of the API, we opened a fairly large part of the application but knew we needed to add on this. We now allow access to things like drop.io Manager, Add via URL and our streaming, real-time features. We knew that our development community needed more control on these features so we added a ton of new parameters and a new PHP helper library, adding it to the Javascript, Ruby and C# libraries we already provide.



With the added functionality we knew that we had to step up our development documentation so that's exactly what we did. We built out a brand new developer homepage (http://dev.drop.io) with a ton of code examples, demo apps and easy-to-follow step-by-step tutorials. We knew that making the documentation as accessible as possible was very important.


The new dev page covers everything from the "How & Why" of the API to drop.io's unique approach to identity, content and distribution. 



A big part of this project were the demo applications and we're happy to say that our Hack-a-thon resulted in quite a few of these. We've listed some of these under the Features Apps menu with more to be released soon. We've got:

PicPoster, a Facebook app that lets you upload photos from drops directly to Facebook photo albums

Nibl.es, a rich-media bookmarklet app that lets you collect photos and text from any webpage with just two clicks

Supportable, a real-time customer support solution

You can check all of them out here: http://dev.drop.io/featured-apps/

Our focus was to build this version out to be easy to understand for anyone interested in drop.io's potential, regardless of development experience, making the development process as accessible as possible. Take a look at what we've put together!

http://dev.drop.io

-drop.io Team

we now expose our 'conversion farm' via our API, so that you can easily upload/give us the URL of a file (video, picture, audio, document, etc.) and a conversion target - and we will convert the file for you and give you real-time feedback on process.

want a target we don't have?, just ask -- ... then, just download your converted file back, ready to go - or serve it from us.  Mike Singleton explains... 



direct link

Want to attach agendas, handouts, and other rich media files to a meeting invitation or poll? Now with Doodle and drop.io, you can! Doodle is an online scheduling and decision making application that lets you easily and quickly find the best meeting time or consensus among a group of people.

the folks over at hubspot suggested we claim our blog for technorati, so - here we are -- this is the code we need to drop to make that happen - we might as well make the process transparent to the world

p6ia7usy8f

The dog days of Summer are upon us which usually means slowing down a bit and sipping lemonade but at drop.io we've been on a tear, working hard and pumping out improvements and new features like a bunch of Sun-worshiping crazies. We're really proud of what's been happening and just wanted to bring our community up to speed on all of the most recent developments.

drop.io Manager get's a new face, improved functionality

We've been getting a ton of very helpful feedback about Manager over the past couple of months and, along with the ideas we've been coming up with, decided it was time to put some of these into action.

First off, we've created a new dashboard which brings the core features that make Manager so powerful right to the surface. We adhere to the notion that an easier experience equals happier users so that was our aim; craft the tool to make it simple to use and with as few clicks required as possible.

Chris Ricca (@chrisricca), our developer responsible for much of this project, created a noticeably cleaner look and an updated color scheme that gives Manager a much friendlier feel.

                             

The most eye-catching feature of the redesign is our new Template Editor which now uses a graphical interface with thumbnails of each template's background image. It's new gallery-style view makes keeping track of templates a lot easier and less tedious of an activity.

                             

You can give the new Manager interface a spin at http://manager.drop.io


Web 2.0 Birds of a Feather, Picture Editing with Aviary

One of the more exciting features that we've brought out recently is our new integration with web-based image manipulation (amongst many other things) powerhouse Aviary. We're obviously pretty impressed with what they've built so we thought it would be a huge win for drop.io to marry their Phoenix Editor technology with our simple, private sharing concept.

Using this feature is a breeze: just right click on any image, select EDIT and a new window will pop up with your image loaded in Aviary Phoenix, ready to be cropped, smudged or otherwise manipulated to your liking. We were really impressed the first time we gave the editor a spin. It's extremely powerful and regardless of which browser we were using, it was slick and performed exceedingly well. 

                             

Please note that if you are using Aviary to edit your photos on drop.io and then delete your drop your files may remain on aviary (though, obviously, in 'private' mode so others do not have access). We just wanted to point it out because we very much believe in and make a big deal about deleting things.

So that's just a couple of the things we've been up to. We're cranking out new features and improvements all the time so stay tuned!

@dropio

-drop.io Team

Drop.io introduces Fetch File, letting you save files from another website directly into your drop.

Have you ever found a file that you want to save but you didn't want to download it to your desktop?  Now you can add any publicly available file directly to a drop, bypassing your computer's hard drive, using a feature called Fetch File.

To fetch a file you'll need to be in a drop. Click "Add" --> "Link" to view the form for adding links and enter the file's url where it says "Add a File at a Url". We'll fetch the file directly into your drop so you have the full original for use later. This is exactly the same as adding the complete original file, just faster and easier. Note that this won't work for sites that you have to log into since our servers are fetching the file on your behalf and they can't access content behind a login.

Those of you who already have manager accounts will have noticed a bevy of improvements, and those of you who haven't... you're missing out.

Improvements include the restyling of Manager's overall appearance, an extended details section when browsing drops, and the handy template-viewer which lets you see all your templates at a glance and create drops from them with a single click. Thanks go to the impeccable design sensibilities of our own Chris Ricca. Sign up for manager at http://manager.drop.io

Drop.io is always eager to hear about the ways you’re using our service. Are you...

•    an architect who uses drop.io to share drawings and photos with draftsman and clients?
•    a creative agency who uses drop.io as a simple way to privately share rich media?
•    a filmmaker who uses drop.io to share dallies back-and-forth from on-location to others back in the office?
•    a teacher who uses drop.io to organize class lectures and post and collect assignments?

These are just a few examples of how we've seen drop.io used in the past - no matter what your use case is, we want to hear about it!

have your say

Please share with us testimonials of how you use drop.io at http://drop.io/hidden/fbw2niqbepntcn/upload -  excited to see everything our drop.io community puts together - especially videos testimonials!  ...of course feel free to also share audio, notes and other feedback as well!

If possible, would be great to label your files name_profession_company (joe smith_architect_abc company).

Thanks!

-team drop.io

Today we are happy to announce a few big improvements.  First and foremost, the media view now has groups.  This has been the number one most requested feature for a long time, and we are thrilled to now have it up.

Add some files, and then when logged in as admin click 'edit groups'  - this will put you in the group editing mode where you can:

* Reorder groups by clicking and dragging a group above or below another
* Reorder files by clicking and dragging it to another location within the group

If your drop is premium (either a one time upgrade or if you have a drop.io manager account) you can:

* Add a custom group by clicking the button below this text
* Rename a group by clicking the group title and typing in a new name
* Change a group's icon by clicking the icon, then choosing a new one from the popup menu
* Move a file to a different group by clicking and dragging it the

                   

One of the best parts of custom groups is that each has it's own URL in the drop.io structure - if you want to direct someone to just a few files in your drop (or give a presentation with just a few files), drag and drop the files into a custom group, and then link them through -- the form is http://drop.io/[dropname]/media/[group name], (or just click on the name of the group)

Even cooler, let's pretend you want to delete a group of files in a drop and don't want to use system view, make a new group called 'trash bin', drag and drop the files you want to remove into the custom group, then just hit the [x] on the drop -- all the files are gone in one shot.

While we were at it, we figured it was worth totally overhauling the homepage.  The goal here was to open up more space to explain what drop.io does and some more of our functionality. We are constantly releasing things, and it was feeling like a lot of great functionality was getting lost, the new homepage will help us remind you of what is up without sacrificing any functionality.  

                    

If you are using drop.io manager codes, or any of the other drop.io landing pages like present.io or conference.io you will still have the old customized homepages at your disposal.  and you can still use all the customized functionality homepages like:

present (http://present.io)
paywall (http://drop.io/home/paywall)
chat (http://drop.io/home/chat)
facebook friendlock (http://drop.io/home/facebook%20friendlock)
etc...  
                        

Finally, we are propagating some big menu changes. We are making the 'download' links more prominent if you permission to download (people had issues with this) and we are standardizing all the menus around 'actions' on files, so it will be easier to edit, rename, link, comment, etc.  

all the best,
The Team

Architects tell us all the time about how they use drop.io in their field.  We think that the innovative ways that architects are designing spaces and buildings are both interesting and valuable.  drop.io is eager to contribute to improving an architect's work flow by providing a simple, private, real-time file sharing and collaboration solution.

Architects have told us that our conference calling features, combined with the easy file-sharing that drop.io offers, have allowed them to replace prior solutions like FTP and long chains of emails.  They've told us how cool it is to have the ability to send CAD files and drawings back and forth with ease.  We've been impressed by how some architects have been using the hidden uploader with engineers and subcontractors to submit proposals.  Others tell us that they use drop.io in the field to quickly preview a drawing or a blueprint without downloading it. 

All of this means that drop.io has allowed architects to become more productive, helped them to reduce costs, and enhanced their client satisfaction - that said, we are always interested to hear about additional ways we can be helpful.  Pete got some great feedback last week when he asked educational professionals how they use drop.io, so we're going to ask architects the same.

Help us out!

We'd greatly appreciate one minute of your time to answer a few simple questions by clicking the link below. In return, we will happily provide you with a free trial of drop.io manager.

http://drop.wufoo.com/forms/dropio-and-architects

mike and zach
drop.io interns

We are very big fans of Boxee - which makes it especially wonderful to share the newest addition to our growing number of API apps, DropBoxee!

As the name suggests, it's a marrying of drop.io's inputs/outputs and boxee's open, social media center.  Upload anything to a drop, then listen to any music/audio, play the videos, surf galleries of pictures right in Boxee on your computer or TV.  So, while the point may be to listen to your favorite playlist, theoretically, you can now literally email or leave voicemail on your TV ....

When boxee launched its dev challenge, it drew the attention of Jon Steinberg (http://jonsteinberg.com/).  Working with Nick Perez and drop.io and boxee APIs, they made it happen.

From Jon's blog post:  "I’m a big fan of boxee, and when I heard about the developer contest, I knew I had to build something... Without even asking, I knew that the Drop.io API would be flexible to do just about anything.  Sure enough it is."

The app itself allows you to access any of your drop.io content through boxee's intuitive interface. Your music will start playing as soon as you enter the app, arranging your drop's mp3s or other audio into a dynamic playlist. Your images are primed for slideshow glory. Your movies are ready to see their opening night debut.

We consider Boxee to be on the absolute forefront of delivering entertainment and media. We love their innovative UI, multi-platform support and commitment to a powerful API that allows developers to add tremendous value to their product.  To install the app, just go the boxee's app repository, then Video/Internet. Click on the DropBoxee icon (it's features a hamster, aww!), enter the name of your drop and password (if you've set one) and you're off to the races. If you haven't create a drop yet, use our demo drop: dropboxeeapp.

We love the integration as users, and are really excited to see people building out custom Inputs/Outputs to leverage drop.io's infrastructure to get their media where they want, how they want.

-Team drop.io

We are thrilled to be releasing a brand new facebook connect integration today 'Friend Lock', which allows you to 'lock' drops using Facebook Connect so that only specific 'friends' or colleagues you define can 'open' a given drop and get access to the files within... making it dead simple for you to let Marty McFly and Dr. Brown access a drop and the files within, while making sure that Biff can't get in. 

As always, it is easier to show than tell http://drop.io/file/fbconnectlock is the screencast
more at http://drop.io/fbconnect -- 

How it’s used: When a drop.io user is adding and sharing files via a 'drop' he or she may access their personal Facebook account information via the settings function of the drop.  Once the user registers the drop with their personal Facebook user identification information (username and password) a tab with a full list of that user’s facebook “friends” will populate on the screen. The user may then use this tab to create a shortlist of facebook friends permitted to access a given drop.   “Friend Lock” restricts access  to exactly the individuals you choose.  You can select as many as you want, and even permission people based on their company name.

In essence, “Friend Lock” offers users the ability to leverage Facebook's robust identity system as a security layer on top of drop.io's dead simple file sharing and collaboration.  As far as we know, this is the first application to leverage facebook connect in this way.  Going forward, drop.io will migrate all of our facebook applications onto connect. 

the release of this function is obviously just coming a few weeks after we made a big push around launching present.io - one click web-based presentations on the drop.io backbone.... but that doesn't make this any less exciting for us.  We discussed the concept of using facebook connect in this way several months ago at the Facebook SXSW garage (http://bit.ly/QRUxO), but now it is very much a reality - and we think we are one of the first (if not the first) service to think of and start using facebook connect not just to distribute out messaging into the facebook community, but as a verification and access layer.  We see this type of integration as the future of an interconnected web of services leveraging each other's strengths.

honestly, it is just that it is one of those where seeing is believing - check it out the video http://bit.ly/presentvid and learn more at http://drop.io/presentation.

then, just try it. 

If you have ever used another software provider to give a presentation, webinar, etc  you know that it is a tough experience.  Web-presentations shouldn't be that hard - and they certainly shouldn't require software, installations, and downloads -- with our real time web-based file-sharing backbone, it just doesn't have to be anymore...

this week was the first full week of a new style of development over at drop.io world hq - we are moving to a new schedule where we focus on one core area for a 14 day cycle, and then move on to the next.  Right now, we are on a quality of service kick, and flying through a whole bunch of improvements and fixes that were - in some cases - long overdue. 

outside of two large 'secret' projects which we continued to revise and are nearing completion (thanks to all alpha testers), highlights from this week include:

1.  simultaneous multiple drop logons - you may have noticed that historically you could only be logged in to one drop at a time (not good), now you can be logged in to as many as you want at the same time(good)

2.  new 'share' options, including subscribing to comments - we overhauled all the 'share' options on drop.io, now you can get email notifications, twitter, facebook, ping.fm, etc. of not just new assets/media added to drops, but also comments, deletions, updates.  it is also just way cleaner and easier to use now

3.  audio conversion improvements:  we treat all audio streams better now, so we will not up-sample small audio files anymore

4.  video conversion improvements:  videos are now H.264 (high definition) and we made it so that they start playing before they fully load (which was really annoying)

5.  IE6:  you may have noticed that we don't really support IE6, now we actually tell you that we don't support it, and give you options to use drop.io in mobile mode, etc. if you haven't updated your browser since2001 ;)

6.  Location.drop.io: have you been geo-locating your drops?  this will get much much faster this weekend.

7.  Link Re-ordering:  some people were having issues re-ordering links in the /media view.  it is fixed.

8.  Twitter O-Auth, and back again:  we implemented twitter O-Auth,something we were really excited to see, and then un-implemented twitter O-Auth when they stopped supporting it again.

9.  Embeds:  embedding drop.io media in other web pages is much better now, it should work more consistently across more platforms, etc. also, embedding elements in drop.io drop notes are better.



10.  Archives (zips) heart stream:  you may have noticed that you needed to refresh your page if you were making a zip of all the median your drop for download -- no more, now they stream in in realtime when they are done. 



There are about another 20 fixes, but I would argue that these are some of the most important from this week.  We are closing out this cycle tuesday, and will be on to our next 14 day cycle - making drop.io easier to use - wed AM.

This week we are excited to launch a partnership with the Advertising Photographers Association (APA), which is the leading national organization run by and for professional photographers and whose ranks include some of the absolute best advertising photographers and image makers. We are happy to be 'powering' their second annual Tell Us A Story Photo Competition.  Learn more about the APA at: http://www.apany.com and the contest at www.apany.com/contest - deadline is April 20th!

We continue to hear stories from photographers on how drop.io has become their preferred solution for sharing full resolution photos, images, and more, collaborating in truly real-time with their colleagues and clients, and presenting their work powerfully with a rich media gallery format with custom branding options.  With the ability to optionally add paywalls to drops and set downloading/viewing settings, drop.io is also great for showcasing work in a protected environment. Learn more about why photographers use drop.io by watching this brief screen cast: http://drop.io/file/managerwelcome
 
Working with the APA we hope to extend these stories to a broader group and help photography professionals share what they want, how they want, with whom they want from anywhere, instantly. With options around using 'drop.io manager' to organize multiple 'drops' from a single interface, customizing drops with branding and color scheme, and the ability to simply add specific privacy controls, we hope to show photographers how they can concentrate on what matters, and not spend so much energy figuring out how to share what they create.   

Steve

I wanted to write a post about a couple of things we're putting out today. The first of which is Phone.io, a service we put together to demo how drop.io's voice and output features come together to make podcasting quick, easy and powerful. Secondly, I want to mention our completely rebuilt rich text editor. We sacked the TinyMCE version we'd been running for a while and put together what has been dubbed "WYSIHAT", an acronym whose last three letters stand for absolutely nothing. Needless to say, we're pretty excited about both.

PHONE.IO

drop.io's core mission has always been simple, private sharing. With Phone.io, we wanted to highlight drop.io's role as a feature-rich podcast and communication platform. As most of our regular users can tell you, every drop, free OR premium, comes with a voicemail number with its own private extension. This is great for leaving messages, impromptu recording sessions, podcasting, etc.

                       


What makes drop.io killer for podcasting is that you can instantly push your content via iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, RSS and more; you hang up, and not only do you have an MP3 of the recording on your drop in realtime, but you can share it across networks as you see fit. Three clicks (or five, I use ALT a lot) and your drop will update Twitter. Three more and your Facebook feed is connected too. iTunes is a one-clicker. This means syndicating your content on major platforms is easy. Your excuses for resisting the allure of the blogosphere are eroding.

Click here to learn more about Phone.io or type in “phone” in the template box on the homepage.

WYSIHAT

In addition to Phone.io, rolling out our new rich text editor has got us pretty happy around drop.io. We've tacked on a bunch of new capabilities that make this version of the editor not only the most solid we've ever had, but also a much more versatile writing tool. You still have all of the same abilities, embedding, link-ifying, raw HTML access, plus a bunch of new features that make it much more powerful. You can now add images via URL, sub/super-script, strike through, control indentation and more. When you're done formatting your note, you can now click 'print' and it will, well, print.


                          

The increase in functionality is something we're more than glad to see but in addition, the rebuild has brought about some much-needed improvements to the editor's stability. The former editor, developed in TinyMCE, had it's good moments and its not-so-good moments. This one has almost 100% good moments.

At drop.io, when it comes to communication and content creation we “eat our own dogfood,” meaning we use drops and our note editor extensively for internal and external purposes. Suffice it to say, we're pretty excited about WYSIHAT. 
We keep churning out new features and improvements so stay tuned, more interesting stuff coming VERY soon.

Peter Frasca
Vox Populi
drop.io

First and foremost, a call to action if you will permit us.  We are honored to be one of 300 finalists for the CNET Webware 100.  If we have been making your life easier and helping you share and collaborate - we would love your 'vote', and if you are really passionate, we would love it if you would pass on the good word...  It was wonderful to hear a few weeks back that we were one of the most frequently nominated companies, and we would love the recognition of a big 'W' (in the non-political family sense).

http://bit.ly/3Ksmra

that said - and with all due respect to CNET - a bit of a gripe wrapped in a bit of commentary about our nomination and how the world is changing. When we heard from CNET that we were a finalist in the 'Infrastructure & Storage' category we were a bit taken aback. 

First, we pride ourselves on as a company running 100% off of 'cloud' computing (primarily AWS) with literally zero physical servers... We think we may be the largest app in the world on several metrics that literally doesn't even rent any physical hardware, let alone not owning any. So, clearly we don't fit in the category as 'infrastructure'.

So, since we don't fit in as 'infrastructure', that implies that we were placed in that category as a 'storage' company.

While maybe not quite as much of a stretch as being considered an 'infrastructure' play, we really don't consider ourselves a storage company in the least. In fact, we avoid using the word storage as much as humanly possible when we describe our platform for simple private sharing and real time collaboration. Sure, millions of people put files, media, information, voice mail, etc in drops and call them back from anywhere, but that hardly makes us a 'storage' solution. Drop.io as a service, and drops as a medium, exists as a lightweight way to get digital content in real time to those who need it, and enable the free flow of information to exactly whom you want, how you want - not put it on ice. We do dead simple realtime 'input' 'conversion' 'access' and 'output', storage is just a necessary bit of moving things around. 

So, we do store digital assets for you in your drops, but only as a means to the very powerful end of simple private sharing and collaboration. Storage is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The solace we take is this... the web is in the middle of another massive revolution, fueled by some new technology, many new practices, and a healthy dose of consumer refinement. This means the 'categories' themselves are changing very rapidly - so, in the end we like to think that just maybe we are in a less than exactly appropriate category because the "categories" are yet again being revolutionized to the point that historic models seem almost nonsensical.