Frequently Asked Questions

The Top 5

I can't remember my drop's password, how do I reset it?
I forgot my drop's name, what do I do?
I lost my drop.io Manager login and/or password, how do I recover them?
I know the password, why can't I log in? Did my drop expire?
The website or my drop is acting a little strange, what should I do?

What is a 'drop'?

A drop is a 'discrete' (yes, "ete") chunk of space you can use to store and share anything (pictures, video, audio, docs, etc) privately, without accounts, personal registration, or email addresses. Our site is not searchable and not 'networked', only people that know the URL of a drop can access it. You can create as many as you want and set things like a password, whether visitors can add to the drop, and how long you want it to exist.

How do I get to my drop?

Every drop has its own unique web address which you can use to return to your drop once it has been made. This URL is always in the form "http://drop.io/(your drop name)". For example, if you wanted to access the drop named "example", you would enter the address "http://drop.io/example" into your web browser.

What can I store & share on drop.io?

Drop.io lets you share photos, video, audio, and other media files really easily. We take most common formats and convert them to be web friendly. If you send us photos we will make thumbnails and put them in a gallery; if you send us videos we'll convert them so you can view them online; if you send us audio we'll stream it; if you send us PDFs we'll convert them too, you get the point.

If you give us a format that we don't yet convert (we are working to expand our conversion Jedi Ninja skills) we will still store them. Any user visiting your drop will be able to click on the file and download it. You can share pretty much anything, for anything, with anyone as long as it is legal and does not violate our terms of service.

What do people use drop.io for?

Our friends have told us that they have used drop.io to do everything from:

for real time project collaboration
privately sharing videos & photos from parties within a group of friends
sharing videos & photos for listings like Craigslist as a better way to present your information/ apartment/ car/ etc.
transferring large files
quickly sharing documents for a project among a group of co-workers, almost like a mini online office
creating places to send comments, photos, documents on the fly while on the go or at a meeting
coordinating group trips by creating a quick space where everyone can share travel plans and photos in real time
keeping a truly private journal and not have it on a computer hard drive or social network
as 'tiny url' for files
and so on...

You can/should use drop.io for anything where very simple storage, sharing, and/or communication are the priorities, so long as it doesn't violate our terms of use or the law.

How do I create a drop?

If you just need some space really fast, all you need to do is click the big 'create drop' button, this will generate some space for you at the pre-set domain with the pre-set options....that said, more typically however you will want to:

1. Set your drop name

We pre-populate a name for your drop, but you can select your own. Free drops need to have names which are 7+ characters, premium drop names need to be 2+ characters. Your drop name is how you get to your content, by typing into your browser http://drop.io/[dropname], so this can be an important decision. Please note a drop name might not be valid if it uses illegal characters, is on our 'banned' list, or is taken by someone else already.

2. Add files

Click the green button and select files you want to put in the drop. You can select multiple files by holding down ctrl or using the shift key just like you do on your desktop. When you click 'open' you will see the little '0 files added' change to reflect the number of files you have now cued up to be uploaded to your new drop. This will cue your files for upload, but the upload will not actually start until you are done with the rest of your settings

3. Optionally change drop characteristics

Set a guest password: depending upon how sensitive the content in your drop you may want the added security of a password. The simple fact that someone has to know exactly your drop name to get to it provides its own security, but if you want to prevent people who might guess your drop name from seeing your stuff, put a password on it. Passwords can be any length of alpha numeric characters so please type carefully because we don't ask you to confirm it.

Set an expiration: at drop.io, we don't believe in your stuff just hanging out on the internet for all eternity by default. That could be bad, right? So, with each drop you set an expiration criteria, which defines the time after which your drop will be deleted by our system. We do mean deleted. The default is that your drop will be deleted one year after the last time someone views it. So, as long as you keep using your drop it will stick around; however, you can choose to make your drop 'hard delete' after a specific timeframe regardless of use by changing this setting. If you set your drop with a 'hard delete' and you happen to want your drop to last longer, all you have to do is come back to your drop and change the settings in the admin panel.

How others can interact with your drop: You can decide whether you want other people visiting your drop to be able to add files, comment and/or delete content.

4. Click that big red 'create drop' button

We will upload all your files (the speed will be dependent on how fast your connection is and how much you are trying to upload) and go to work converting everything to web friendly formats. We will ask you if you want an admin password, which is the password you will need to change characteristics on the drop and if you want to associate and e-mail address with your drop. If you don't make an admin password, you cannot change your drop later (see below)! Then, you're done!

Note, on your first login you are considered an "administrator" no matter what you do, so even if you set your drop to be "view only" you as an admin will see that you can "view, comment, and add" fear not, others will not have those options

What is this admin password thing?

Once you have created a drop we do give you just one more option: do you want to set an admin password? This password is different from the 'guest' password we asked about when you set up your drop. This password is what you use to change the characteristics of the drop you just made, it is the really powerful password that you should either keep 100% to yourself, or only share with people you want to allow complete control to do essentially anything to the drop you made, including destroy it, move it, change the guest password, etc.

Again, this is optional, you don't have to set an admin password, but if you are going to want control over the drop in the future, you probably should set one.

What is the Global Right-click Menu and how do I use it?

We wanted to make getting at drop.io's rich functionality easier so now it's just a single right-click away. Right-click on any file and you'll be able to:

view a preview of the file
go to a single page view of the file
add comments
download
get the link URLs
get the embed code
rename/delete the file
for images, rotate them in your drop or edit them with Aviary's Phoenix interface
send the file out via e-mail, SMS, fax (if your drop is upgraded or created with a drop.io Manager account) or send to another existing drop

Viewing a drop:

Once you have created a drop you can view it by going to drop.io/[dropname]. Right now you can view a drop one of eight ways...media, blog, chat, system, Cooliris, chronological, page and mobile views.

Media view shows your stuff grouped out by what it is - the photos go together, the notes go together, the audio files go together, video, docs, etc... this is the default view because thus far it is what people have used the most. But there are other ways to view your media as well...

Blog view let's you view your drop as a mini/lightweight blog. Media is grouped out by the day when it was added and makes your drop a publishing platform for you content.

Chat view is our dedicated view where users can create a completely private space to chat in just 2 clicks. If you're not into having this on your drop, you can always disable chatting in your drop's Admin options.

System view is a way to access your files in a manner that's very similar to how you work on your computer's desktop. You can sort, change to either file names or thumbnails, and use a right-click context menu and can rotate photos.

Cooliris view is an interactive and eye-catching way to view videos and images in a 3-dimensional, smooth-scrolling gallery wall.

Chronological view the way to view all files, notes and comments in a drop in the order they were added. It's like the /blog view but without grouping by day.

Page view takes all links in a drop and uses them as navigation points. This is the best way to link multiple drops together or to reference outside sources relating to a drop.

Mobile view is the way you want to get to drop.io if you're using your cell phone that doesn't have a robust web browser. You can reach it by adding /m to the end of your drop's address, such as drop.io/example/m.

By the way: the blog view is the default first view that a visitor sees when accessing your drop, but you can change that to the other views in the admin options if you would like or by accessing the DEFAULT VIEW menu after clicking VIEW.

How is drop.io 'Real Time', what does that mean?

Drop.io, with the launch of the Real Time feature, is now 100% live. As soon as you add a file, it appears in your drop. No refreshes needed. Get more info here.

Admin options:

Drop.io is easy and fast, but that doesn't mean we don't have some fun extra stuff under the hood. If you have created an admin password (or if you just set your drop we automatically log you in as an admin the very first time regardless) click the 'settings' link in the upper right corner...then

Drop Details: shows you some basic drop characteristics, like how many times it has been viewed, etc

Maintenance: here you can rename, empty, destroy, associate with an admin email and change the name of your drop.

Upgrade: this is where you bump up your drop's size and duration. Click here for more details.

Customize: from this panel you can change your drop's logo, it's background color or image, the type of navigation that's used, it's timezone, it's default view and add a description

Access Control: This is where you determine what your guest and admin passwords are as well as enabling hidden access.

Input/Output Settings: This is the panel where you can manage all of your drops MMS, e-mail and twitter subscriptions. You can also customize their formatting, toggle Rich Media for your RSS feed and add/remove/change your secret e-mail key.

Paywall: Set up your Paywall account here and start selling your digital content.

Chat: Configure the chat permissions for your guests.

Location: With this panel you can assign a real world location to you drop.

Adding more stuff to drops with the 'Add' Button:

With the 'Add' button you can upload files, voice messages, add notes, and links. From the 'More' link, you can download the Firefox plug-in, get the Widget embed code and more.

What are 'Groups' in /Media view and how do I work with them?

For a while we've been asked about having a more robust means of organizing files within drops. This is why we developed the 'Groups' feature for the /Media view. This is a really powerful way to keep all of your files arranged in exactly the configuration that you want, leveraging your drop's real-time and drag & drop features.

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 neighboring group

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.

What can I do with the Drag & Drop.io Firefox add-on?

With version 2.0 you can do the usual (drag and drop files from your desktop to your drop or shoot them to a new drop on the fly) but you can now also drag and drop:

Directories (w00t!) from your computer -- dragging directories will grab every file in the directory and in every subdirectory recursively
Text/links/HTML from webpages -- text becomes notes, links become links in your drop, and HTML becomes a rich note with that HTML (minus any tags we strip out)
Browser tabs -- this will put a link to that tab in your drop.

You can also:

Bookmark all of your drops -- this is really handy if you have a few and have a hard time remembering all of them
Set a default drops for files to be uploaded to when dragging and dropping to the drop.io logo in the status bar
Set default settings for any new drop that is created with the plugin -- you can set an upgrade code, admin password, expiration length, and guest permissions to be automatically used when a new drop is created
Control+shift+D to put a link to the tab you are currently viewing into your default drop
Keep dragging and dropping more files into the same drop or other drops. The new files will be appended to the queue of files to be uploaded, and will be uploaded to the appropriate drop when the time comes.
Hover the mouse over the status bar to see what file is currently uploading to what drop
Click the status bar to either skip the current file, or cancel the entire upload

How do I embed things in my drop? What things can I embed?

All you have to do embed objects into your drop is to add a note, click the embed button, paste in the embed code and your done. We currently support media from:

YouTube
Vimeo
Viddler
Seesmic
Twitter
uStream
Hulu
Revision 3
DailyMotion
Drop.io widget/video/pics/audio

How can I assign a location to my drop?

You can now assign a real world, physical location to your drop. To do so, just log in with your admin password, click SETTINGS, and finally location. You can choose to let the loki feature look up your approximate location or enter your address in the bar. Get the rest of the details at drop.io/dropiolocation.

How do I edit my images with Aviary's online image editor?

All you need to do is right-click on any photo and select EDIT. This will take you to Aviary's image editor. When you're done cropping, adding text or whatever it is you crazy kids like to do nowadays, just save the image and click GO BACK TO SITE. This will bring you back to your drop with the now-edited image.

Present.io, drop.io's Presentation Mode

Every drop has a built in presentation mode. Log in to the drop as the 'admin' (using the administrator's password) and you can instantly start a real-time web based media presentation to everyone else on your drop. No one needs to download anything, there is no registration or installations - it just works, 100% in your browser. So you can say, "meet me at http://drop.io/mypresentation, and let me walk you through the meeting materials" to as big a group as you want.

NOTE: Presentations in free drops are limited to 10 real-time participants. To remove that limit, either upgrade your drop or sign up for a drop.io Manager account.

You can get all of the details on how to use present.io here.

Managing your drop's E-mail alert, twitter and SMS subscriptions

It's easy to have people follow your drop with E-mail alerts, twitter, SMS updates and more. Sometimes though, you'd like to know who has subscribed for which and maybe even thin the herd a little (re: frienemies). To do this, log in with your Admin password, enter the admin panel by clicking SETTINGS->INPUT/OUTPUT SETTINGS->SUBSCRIPTIONS. You'll see a list of all the contacts that have been subscribed and can edit and/or delete them.

My drop's appearence is a little, eh [insert slightly unflattering asthetic commentary], how can I change that?

People like to customize their experience. We get that.

You can add a logo, change your accent color and change its background image or color. Just log in with your admin password, click 'settings' and then 'customize.' Be creative but never, under any circumstances, combine #3CFF00 and #EE00FF ...instant IP ban.

What's the limit on how big individual files can be?

The current limit on the size of individual files is 2gb.

Shh! What is Hidden Access, why is it cool and how do I use it? Shh!

Everyone knows that drop.io makes it simple to share your stuff with whoever you want, as publicly or privately as you want. But, what if you want someone to add files to your drop but you don't want them to know where the files are going? How about if I want someone to download a file from your drop but don't want them to know where it's coming from?

The Hidden Access feature lets you use drop.io without exposing your drop.

After you've uploaded a file to your drop, if you click to preview it and then click the 'link' button, you'll see a line that says 'hidden link.' This is what you would send to people that you want to let download the file but not know what drop it is coming from. To access your drop's hidden uploader (the place you can send people to send files to your drop without them knowing where they're going), go into you admin options by clicking 'SETTINGS' and then 'Hidden Access.'

Get the rest of the details at drop.io/hiddenaccess.

How do I use Facebook with drop.io?

With Facebook Friend Lock is an easy way to allow your fellow Facebook friends to access your drop just by using their login information.

To set this up:

Log in with your admin password
Click 'Settings', 'Facebook' and then Connect with Facebook
Follow the prompt to enter your Facebook information
Add whoever you'd like to be able to acccess this drop using their Facebook login information.

You probably want to allow yourself to have that ability too so click 'Make Admin' while you're at it.

Google Analytics and your drop

Google Analytics is a powerful way to track a website's traffic and trends. You can associate a drop with your Google Analytics account by copying the unique identifier number from the Javascript it asks you to copy into your webpage. The number should look something like UA-1234567-8. NOTE: In order to activate and use this feature, your drop must either be upgraded to a Premium drop or associated with a drop.io Manager account.

What's this Custom Sidebar thing, how can I use it?

In each drop, provided the creator of the drop doesn't remove it, there is a Custom Sidebar. It can be adjusted to include whichever drop.io Widgets you'd like to have like drop.io's Audio Player, the drop's information and a ton of more stuff. Provided you're logged in as Admin, you can edit it by clicking "Customize Sidebar" and then adding, reordering or removing widgets.

The email/mms in function

When you create a drop you not only get a custom url at drop.io/[dropname] but we also generate an email address [dropname]@drop.io this way you can email or mms files and notes directly into your drop just by attaching them to a message.

Please remember that you cannot email things into drops that don't allow guests to add files.

Email/MMS to create new drops on the fly

One cool semi-hidden function is that you can email or MMS new@drop.io to create a new drop on the fly

write an email or mms message to new@drop.io
in the subject line put n: followed by a desired name for your new drop. For example, n: MyDropName
in the body of the message type a note and/or attach a file you would like to put in the drop

Wait a few moments and drop.io will message you back letting you know that your new drop has been created on the fly, the name of your new drop, and all the necessary drop information

What is the Secret E-mail Key?

You can add a Secret E-mail Key to any drop's e-mail address in order to make it hard for your drop to be spammed. If you happened to pick a drop name that's easy to guess, it's possible that some nefarious party might send files or messages in via your e-mail address, such as easy@drop.io. In order to thwart this, you can add this key which will be appended to the drop name portion of your drop's e-mail address. So it will look something like this: easy.Rh372@drop.io instead. Take that spammers!

What is the HTML Uploader and how can it help me out?

Once inside your drop, if you click ADD you'll see a small red link for the HTML Uploader directly below the Indicator Bar for the Flash Uploader. Click that link and you'll get sent to a very simple upload interface that is helpful if you're having issues with Flash (if you're having Flash issues, it's always good to go to here to get the most current version available). Here's a short screencast that shows you how to use the HTML uploader.

NOTE: Files can only be added one at a time.

How do I add files via URL?

If you click ADD then MORE, you'll see an area that allows you to enter a file's URL (place on the internet, like http://examplewebsite.com/123.jpg). Enter that address and we'll fetch the file and upload it to your drop... simple!

How to call your drop on the phone

Each drop has an individual voicemail number. If you have sufficient permission to add to the drop (either because you are logged in as the drop admin or the drop allows you to 'add' as a user) you can look up the phone number in the 'drop details' widget in the Custom Sidebar or in the Drop Details admin panel (Settings->Drop Details). Pick up a phone, dial the custom number and extension and start talking... when you hang up your message will be converted to an MP3 and left in your drop. you can learn more about this function at drop.io/phone.

Faxing documents into your drop

Your drop can receive faxes too! Each drop has a custom cover page. If you have sufficient permission (either because you are logged in as the drop admin or the drop allows you to 'add' as a user) you can get access to the custom coverpage in the 'more' section from the 'Add' tab. All you need do is send your fax to the number specified on the custom cover page and make sure that the drop.io custom cover page is the first page of the fax document. It does also help to make sure that your fax is on the highest resolution possible. Send the fax in, wait a few minutes, and it will appear in your drop as a .pdf! NOTE: Faxing out from a drop is a premium-only feature.

More information on this is available at drop.io/fax

Download the originals and zipping your drop

Drop.io always tries to convert things you add to your drop to be 'web friendly' - but regardless of whether we can or not you and those with access to your drop can always download the originals. To do this all you need do is right click on any file and click Download.

But what if you want to download the whole drop? It would be slow and annoying to go file by file clicking and downloading each on its own... So, you don't have to. Click 'Share' at the top of your drop and you will see the 'zip' option. Click the button and drop.io will zip all the files in your drop up into one archive (this may take a few moments)... Once we are done with the process all you need do is click on the newly created button that say ZIP on the right side of you drop.

Email notifications: knowing when a drop gets updated

If you are using a drop or a set of drops with a team of colleagues or a group of friends you may want to be notified every time your drop is updated. If so, you can 'subscribe' to a drop via email. If you give us your email we will send you a note each time a new file is added to the specific drop you asked to watch or whatever other event you would an e-mail to be triggered by. We don't use these email addresses for anything else and un-subscribing is literally one click.

To do this just click 'Share' at the top of your drop and then 'E-mail'.

RSS feeds, with rich enclosures

If you have access to a given drop you can grab the drop's RSS feed. This feed not only will allow you to keep up to date with changes and additions to the drop, but it contains the actual new files that are being added to the drop (as long as the admin hasn't blocked it). So, if you have a feed reader that can handle flash and embeds you can actually see all the content coming into your drop right in your RSS reader. If you are really technically sophisticated, you can do even more interesting stuff with the feed still... This can be really really powerful. You can, for instance, use the RSS feed to pipe out voicemails being left on the drop with the custom phone number.

Embedding media from drop.io elsewhere on the web

We give each file in drop.io that we can convert to be web friendly its own 'embed' code so that you can place the media elsewhere on the web. Remember, this doesn't work on all pages based on the permissions of any third party site on which you are trying to embed the media.

Sending documents out via fax/email/mms

Drop.io gives you a ton of different ways to get media into your drop, but you can also send it back out via a lot of different channels. To send media 'out' click on the 'Share' tab at the top of your drop.

Fax: if you have a premium drop, you can fax out .doc, .pdf, .xls files by just entering the number you want to send them to (more at drop.io/fax)
Email: you can email out almost any file on drop.io under 10 mb (that's the current limit on most e-mail applications like Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, etc.). just enter the recipient's email address and a brief note
MMS: you can send files directly to mobile phones by entering the phone number and carrier of the recipient. Please note that carriers sometimes limit file types and sizes

Copying files from one drop to another

Sometimes you might need to copy a file from one drop to another. This is no problem so long as the receiving drop is not 'view only'. Just click on a file, right-click, select 'SEND' and then 'TO EXISTING DROP.' Lastly, enter the name of the drop in (no http://drop.io necessary, just the [dropname]). The file will be copied from the drop you are looking at to the drop you specified. It may take a second because we may have to re-convert it, but it is much faster than re-uploading it

You might ask, why would I ever want to do that? The answer is that heavy users of our own service we find it very very useful. Pretend you have a drop of private work documents and you need to share one or two with an outsider. Make a new drop and copy just those files over to a separate location you can share with them (just like a separate folder). Or, perhaps you go on a trip with some friends, you share a drop with all the pictures from the event, but there are just a few important pictures you want to keep. Just copy them over to a personal drop, and then forget about the single use trip drop.

What is Paywall?

Paywall is the feature that allows you to charge for access to your drop. With Paywall, visitors pay for single or time based subscription access. For example, you can charge $5 per visit or $10 per day/week/month/year. You're the boss. You decide how much and on what basis.

To get started, log into your drop with your admin password, click 'Settings' and then the Paywall link on the left side of the page. You can now set terms for what you'd like to charge people visiting your drop. Click 'Save' and we'll take you to Amazon.com to get your Amazon Payments Business Accounts set up. If you already have an account, you're fine, you can use it. Once your's all done we'll shoot you back to your drop's admin page and you can start making millions.

As soon as you have your storefront set up you can sell access to your drop which can contain whatever you'd like. Just make sure it doesn't conflict with our or Amazon's terms of use.

We charge 1% per transaction on top of Amazon's base fees. To see Amazon's fee structure visit this link and scroll down to the "Pricing" section. We've researched numerous options and find these very competitive. Please note that during the Paywall process Amazon will identify your name as the seller.

Visit our Paywall Demo for more details and instructions on how to get up and running.

What is drop.io Manager and how can I use it?

drop.io Manager is a simple, professional, and cost-effective way for your business to privately share media and collaborate. It incorporates a full-fledged administration system for overseeing a large group of drops that can be easily customized with your organization's branding and identity. Manager is a powerful tool that is being used by several large businesses and academic organizations.

With Manager, the drop's administrator creates custom templates which encapsulate all of the options they'd like their various drop to have. For instance, they can enable users to chat, set the logo for the drop and not allow users to download. This is a great way to create different series of drops for each department in a company, preconfiguring their drops with exactly the features they need, places them at their fingertips, and culling whatever features they don't.

This service also features the option to dynamically adjust the capacity and other qualities of its drops on-the-fly. Need more space for a drop? Add it. Need to change the Guest password for another drop? Go for it. drop.io Manager's focus is providing an easy way for an organization to leverage our rich set of inputs and outputs and all of the other features that make drop.io simple, private and professional.

You can get more information here as well as check out our drop.io Manager demo video.

I lost my Manager password and/or login, what do I do?

If you can't remember your Manager password or login, after entering the wrong login information on http://manager.drop.io, click the "Forgot Login/Password" link that appears and enter the e-mail address you used to register the account. You'll be sent a link that will allow you to reset your login information.

Here's a short screencast that will show you how to do this: http://www.screenjelly.com/watch/xzKh-0734fw.

How private is drop.io?

Drop.io is exactly as private as you and the people you share your drop with make it. If you tell lots of untrustworthy people where your drop is, the password, link to it everywhere (especially on the public web, where we can't control if your stuff gets picked up by search engines), then it is not private at all. If you tell no one then it is really private. All we can do, all any third party could ever do, is tell you that:

Since we don't require your email address, name, personal registration anywhere, we can't sell your information or give away your identity
We don't keep a directory of drops anywhere that can be searched/directly crawled
We use some relatively simple and other slightly more complex tactics to try to block search engines and people trying to snoop around the site
We are not building a "network" and drops are not automatically linked to/made into a directory

Do drops expire?

Yes, all drops are set to expire under some sort of condition. At the extreme you can set them so that they don't expire until they are not used for a full year. If you set your drop to expire on a specific date and then change your mind, you can always update the setting provided you set an admin password. This is slightly different if you have a premium drop. If you have a premium drop and stop paying us your drop will go away (there is no way to keep premium drops around forever unless you keep renewing your payment, but hopefully you will agree with us that this is a both necessary and fair way of looking at it.)

That said, please do keep one thing in mind. If you do let your drop expire, we can't recover it for you.

However, what you can do is associate an e-mail address with your drop so that two weeks prior to your drop expiring, you'll get a message from us letting you know its status. This is part of the password recovery feature.

This is an admin option, so you know the deal. Log in with your ADMIN password, click 'Settings' then 'Maintenance' and finally 'Associate Email.' Enter your e-mail address and you're set.

The website or my drop is acting a little weird, what should I do?

If the website is performing strangely - it could be that we updated something, and your computer's browser got left behind! The 1st step if you are having a problem like this is to delete your cache/cookies and check your Flash version: here's a video that will show you how to do that http://bit.ly/VEhM0.

I know the password, why can't I login?

If your password used to work but does not work anymore it could be because your drop has expired. It could also be that you misspelled the drop name and are attempting to login to a nonexistant drop.

The login page is displayed whenever you attempt to access a drop which does not exist or is expired. Drop.io works this way because it makes all drops more private. There is no way for an overly curious person to tell that a drop exists, as long as it has a guest password.

I'm not the Admin and I lost the drop's guest password, help!

Try to contact the person who created the drop... they can either tell you the guest password or log into the drop using their admin password and set a new guest password. Because there are no accounts and no email for guests, this means we have no way to know who you are or if we should grant you access to a drop you have lost access to. So, please be careful.

I forgot my drop's name, help!

If you were using the drop with a friend, ask them for the drop name. If you were using it on your own and you didn't write the name down anywhere...sadly the drop is lost. Part of the ease and simplicity of drop.io comes from the fact that we do not require usernames or passwords. The downside of this is that if you don't associate an e-mail address with your drop, we have no way to recover it.

The good news is that even if you forget your drop's name, in the absolute worst case scenario your drop will evaporate in less than one year and you don't have to worry about your stuff remaining up on the internet for the rest of time.

Luckily, if you HAVE associated an e-mail address with your drop (by clicking 'settings' then 'maintenance' and the 'Associate Email') you can go to drop.io/drop_names, enter your e-mail address and we'll send you a list of all of your drops.

I can't remember my password or drop name, what do I do?

To make sure that this doesn't happen, just associate your e-mail address with your drop and you can forget your password as many times as you'd like. Log in with your admin password, click 'Settings' then 'Maintanence' and finally 'Associate E-mail'.

If you don't have an e-mail associated with your drop, sadly, no dice. Part of the ease and simplicity of drop.io comes from the fact that we do not require usernames or passwords. The downside to this is that if you lose your admin password we have absolutely no way to verify that you made a drop, and therefore that we can't grant you access as an admin.

Here's a short screencast that will show you how to do this: http://www.screenjelly.com/watch/RZUNeLz7FVo.

What are 'upgraded' drops, how do I get one?

Premium codes allow you to add additional functionality to your drop, like extra storage. Sometimes we give away new codes to do other kinds of stuff; things that we don't necessarily advertise or ask you to pay for. For those of the right age, think stuff like 'FUNDS' (SimCity freaks) or 'UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A....' (Contra) or MLI (Wolfenstein).

'Premium' codes: 'Premium' codes allow your drop to hold up to 25 GB for up to 3 years. Also, it allows you to have drop names that are as short as 2 characters, fax documents from your drop, apply Google Analytics and more.

I lost my upgrade drop codes, help!

If you lose your upgrade codes we can sometimes help. While we have a no refund policy, we can re-issue you more drop codes based on your transaction receipt number again, your name or email address will not help here as we don't keep them, so hang onto that receipt. If you contact us because of lost drop codes we will deactivate all of your un-used codes and re-issue you new ones. This could take up to a week, so again, please be careful.

Does drop.io have an API?

Yes, yes we do!

Drop.io's API is a 'switchboard' - we make it really simple to share any sort of content, from any digital input, with exactly whom you want how you want. The system is designed to be the easiest way possible to route data and content between and among people, and that is it. We build and expose systems for 'input', 'output', and setting 'access' (IOA)... everything else is up to our users. Drops are just a format for simple private sharing... the context and ends are up to you.

For more information, click here.

On 'hot linking', our thoughts and policies.

If you don't know what 'hot linking' is, skip this - if you do here is the deal. We don't let you pull direct links to files we can't 'convert' to be web friendly, or the originals of anything. We do give you links to embed or directly refer people to converted web-friendly formats. This means, as many have discovered, that if you try to pull the URL for a given file like a .rar or a .zip and share it around the link will quickly go dead. We know this can be annoying, and we are going to develop some compromises, but for now no dice, as I am sure many of you know, it just isn't sustainable from a business model perspective for us, and it isn't how we add value for the world.

So, embed away, and link all you want to any files drop.io converts for you (pictures, audio, movies, docs, etc.) but we just can't allow you to completely bypass our site with direct links to originals

How do report a drop that's breaking drop.io's terms of use?

If you come across a drop that's contains anything that is in breach of our terms of use please let us know right away by clicking '!Report this drop' at the bottom of drop. This pulls the drop down immediately for us to review. A window will appear that will ask you to describe the content and include your e-mail address so if need be we can contact you.

Are there any jobs available at drop.io?

If you're in NYC and looking to work with a hot startup named drop.io send your resume to jobs@dropio.com. We are primarily always on the hunt for talented developers (ruby primarily, but AJAX masters and interface gurus feel free to apply) who are interested in working on some really interesting problems in a small team. We work hard, but have a lot of fun...

Who is behind drop.io?

Drop.io was founded in the summer of 2007 by Sam Lessin and Darshan Somashekar. It largely grew out of the realization that they (ok, really we) both maintained basic FTP sites just to move stuff around privately, and it was kind of annoying to say the least - Directly before that we were at Bain, and before that college Darshan at Brown and Sam at Harvard. The drop.io World Headquarters is located in DUMBO, Brooklyn but we've been known to work basically anywhere with a live internet connection. We are backed by RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham, two of the premier NYC venture firms, for which we are very grateful. Our advisory board includes people like Nicholas Negroponte and Strauss Zelnick, who have been wonderfully generous in their time and in lending their amazingly deep insight. We are working with a superb team which we deeply value.

Drop.io is also made up of a group of talented, driven and dedicated developers, marketing and business development professionals and an inspired community management team. Find out who we are here.

Why are you called drop.io, what the heck is '.io' ?

The 'drop' part is easy. You can drop anything basically anywhere really easily gravity takes care of it. We are like gravity for any/all information from anywhere....we are a solution for online 'dropping'

The 'io' part is a little more interesting. First off, '.io' is the Top Level Domain for the British Indian Ocean Territory, yah, we had no idea either until we were poking around wikipedia. We are using it because: 1. We see our role primarily is as a really simple In/Out switch for all your information 2. The British Indian Ocean Territory is an enormous expanse of water with lots of islands in it, which, at a stretch, we think is a good metaphor for our site. Unless you know exactly where to look, all you are going to see in the '.io' is an expanse of water 3. drop.io makes our name seem sufficiently playful and 'web 2.0', our company may actually be old school, but it helps recruiting.

Future plans?

Consider this the very tip of the iceberg. We have a lot of ideas on how to improve the product and expand its horizon in both big and small ways. We are going to keep driving at the principles of utter simplicity and privacy, because that is what we believe in and what we want as users of our own service...for now, let's just say we are happy to have you using a drop.io, which we really, really believe in.

More info and contact

For user support you can send e-mail to contact@dropio.com or check us out at getsatisfaction.com/dropio.

For corporate and business inquires please contact us at inquiries@dropio.com.

Drop.io, Inc.
68 Jay Street
Unit 413
Brooklyn, NY 11201