want to just see it? = screencast

Since we founded drop.io our mantra has been 'simple private sharing'.  We focus all our energy on making it as dead simple as possible for you to exchange any media, information, and data with exactly whom you want how you want for as long as you want...

on Tuesday we are fundamentally changing the game by taking our entire platform real-time for all rich-media, with fully integrating web chat, support for third party clients, and mobile real-time chat support (iphone, gphone, etc). 

So, drops are now alive.

Simply create a drop in one click, inviting collaborators to a custom url, and drop.io gives you a rich media private real-time stream for private sharing and exchange.  If anyone adds a file, writes a note, adds a link, sends in an email to drop, calls in a voicemail to the private line, etc.  that file appears on the drop for everyone, and can be instantly viewed, played on the site, and downloaded.  No page refreshes, just real-time file sharing and collaboration through all drops.

Meaning...

1.  fully live asset and change streaming (with zero page refreshes)
2.  /chat dedicated view with all files, notes, messages in-line
3.  'chat' layer on every view
4.  /chat mobile view (iPhone, Gphone, others)
5.  third party chat support
6.  supports all other drop.io 'inputs', including API apps
...(learn more)

Why?

Storing files online isn't the point, it never has been - we strive to create the best sharing and collaboration tool for any group, team, or organization and in our minds this means go fully real-time or go home, and we are very proud to be breaking new trail in this respect. 

For drop.io 'realtime' isn't about fostering, filter, and display open conversation - that is the job of others.  Rather, what we continue to strive to enable pre-existing, largely real world, structured groups with realtime media sharing. 

This means we look to enable in as simple a way as possible any group of co-workers collaborating on a project, a school classroom, or a conference session.   If you are using drop.io as a tool with a group of collaborators pulled together from another online or network service, that is fine.  You take care of figuring out the team with which you want to collaborate or share, we will provide the tools for sharing the media and hosting the collaboration.  There are great other services that specialize in identity, network, and distribution...  use those to define your group - we are hear to provide a feed to enable the group you choose. 

Major Use Cases?

Team Collaboration:  the drop.io team has been using a team drop on a daily basis for weeks now as our primary means of collaboration.  Every morning the team members navigate to the drop, or  open a chat client pointing to the drop.  Sometimes when people are in meetings or on the road they log in with their phones.  This allows the team not only to stay in sync with normal chat messages back and forth while working on projects, but it makes collaborating on documents and media assets a breeze.  Being able to pass around a design sketch, or snap an idea with a camera phone and instantly have it in front of the whole group has been really effective.  Best of all, the historical feed of all media, links, notes, etc sent back and forth remain in the drop for easy reference and project tracking.

Conferences and meetings:  we have also been experimenting with how realtime works for live events.  We have been testing setting up a drop for a live event, and then asking participants to log on to the drop by simply navigating to the drop name.  People can then posts questions, comments, relevant links, and rich media specifically relating to the event at hand in real time.  This works as well for a large group meeting with the feed of drop information projected on a wall as it does for a conference call where a project is being reviewed by several parties.

Enabling other existing groups:  we know that many real world communities, societies, and organizations have been enjoying drop.io as an easy way to share media with their constituents. We hope this real-time release will help them further collaborate and share with each other either tied to specific events, or on a day to day basis.

More:  the key is that with this system you can directly point groups of people to a private web address.  No signup, no registration, no software, no hassle.  This ease of access to live rich media feeds is extensible in all sorts of ways and we have been excited to hear some early ideas from the drop.io user community on how they will adopt it for the classroom, and other relevant settings.

for the technically interested, how are we doing it... 

Using the Jabber (XMPP) protocol and through a chain of events mediated by JavaScript, BOSH and XMPP drops are now updated for all users viewing that drop in real-time. We are using ejabberd, which is known for its high level of compliance with XMPP. On the front end we use the Strophe javascript library, which uses  a technique called Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (BOSH) to connect to a Jabber server.

Each drop is assigned its very own chat room on our Jabber setup, and whenever a user views the drop, Strophe automatically logs the user into the drop’s chat room. Whenever an event such as a file creation occurs, drop.io's application servers send an XMPP message to the drop’s chat room describing the event.

this rich media live environment is done 100% with cloud computing solutions - as always, drop.io uses zero physical servers.