I got a beta invite to Dropbox last week and have been playing with it ever since. You can think of Dropbox as a free version of Amazon’s S3 service. It allows you to sync any files from your computer, PC or Mac, to there web interface. But unlike S3, any changes make to any file in your Dropbox will will be updated on any computer that has that file. Lets dig a little deeper.

Getting Started

To get started you have to install a small file on your system and it sits in your tray. You then link through there site your computer to your Dropbox. After that your ready to go. On Vista it puts a new folder inside your Documents folder called My Dropbox. On a Mac it’s under your Home folder. Now your ready to share.

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Public vs. Private

To start any files that you have are private and can only be seen and changed by you or any computer linked to your Dropbox. But if you wish to share a folder with another user its as easy as making a new share folder through the site and putting in the email address of the person you want to share it with. But if you only want to show someone some photos its even easyer. On your system just go to your Photos folder and right click on it and go to down to Dropbox and click on Copy public gallery link. You now have images that anyone can see like this one.

Simplicity by Design

One thing that stands out the more I use Dropbox is that how easy it is to use. Now I am not your average use but even the so called “AOL user” should be able to understand quickly how to do anything. Most people would use this just to keep files backed up or to be able to get files from work and home. And if they wanted to add new files its just drag and drop. Everyone knows that. The web layout is also clean and easy to understand. There is no real Web 2.0 stuff going on. Just the info you need.

Deleting Files and more

No such thing as losing files here. If you or someone else deletes a file its not really gone. Just go back to the web site and there is a link at the bottom that says show deleted files. From there you can restore any file that you have recently deleted. Dropbox also saves the changes to your files each time and labeling them different versions. Again you don’t lose anything.

Overall…

Overall i really like Dropbox. It is easy to use and understand. Can be used on PC or Mac at the same time (sorry Linux). It is free and you get 2 gigs of space. That is not a lot once you start adding files but this is still a start up and still only by invite. The only thing that I wish Dropbox had is a way to add files through email. I was thinking of this when I was checking my email on my iPhone. If I receive a Word file or a picture on my phone I could forward that email to my Dropbox address and have it pull out all the files and put them in a folder that I choose. That would be nice.

This is a very nice and will thought out cloud computing idea. I can tell I am going to be using this for some time. And being in beta I hope it only gets better. If you would like to check out a good screencast of what Dropbox can do check out getdropbox.com.

Pownce is the web app/site made by Megatechtronium that is a small company with four people – Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, Kevin Rose, and Shawn Allen. The best known in that list is Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, and Daniel Burka, lead designer for Digg. What is Pownce? The best way to say it is Twitter on steroids. A mashup of a instant messenger program, a microblog and a file sharing app.

What do I get?

There are two ways you can use Pownce and that is with there desktop software that runs on Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) or the web site. When you signup you get your own page where you can see all the messages/links/files you have sent or your friends have sent to you. How it works is you pick if you want to send a message, a link, a file, or a event. After you pick what you are sending you get to pick who your going to send it to. You can choose your friends, the public, one friend, or any groups that you have made. After you have made your post people can then comment on it. If you add a friend after you have made a post but want your new friend to know about it you can forward it to them or if you wish to just delete any of your post you can do that to.

There are two types of accounts you can have. A normal one that everyone has when they sign up. With that the limit on file size that you can send is 10mb per file. The other is a Pro account for $20 a year where the ads are eliminated and the size of files you can send is pushed up to 100mb per file. So as you can see there isn’t much you can’t do with Pownce.

Not everything is great

If you go to the about page you will read the following.

Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. You can do it all on our web site, or install our lightweight desktop software that lets you get out of the browser.

One problem that I have found with there desktop software and it “letting you get out of the browser” is that you can see if there is a reply to your post but you can’t read them. You have to go back to the site to do that. In fact if you want to reply to a post or get a file someone has uploaded you have to go back to your browser. Some other things that I hope are fixed are not being able to minimize the program to the system tray. Also I can’t seem to send files using the program. I have reinstalled it a few times but when I click on the file I want to send nothing shows up in the browser box. Overall the problems are small and as you can see in the image above the program is still in alpha.

Who is this for?

The people that will get the most out of Pownce are any group of people that are working on something that are not close to one another. The best example that I can think of is a group of people making a mod for a game. With Pownce you can share ideas and keep them in a organized manner (try doing that with Twitter). You could share all the files you want without having to host them yourself and if you all need to get together on Skype or IRC just send a event post. So if you want to do more then just send text messages over the web then then Pownce might be your thing.

For people that are showing there Twitter post on there site, and there are a lot of them, you can use the Pownce for WordPressplugin by Ronald Heft. Just go to the top of this page to see it in action.

If you have gotten this far and would like to try Pownce I have 6 invites left. Just leave your email address or if you want to be safe a link to where I can get your email address below.