Dropbox

My first post here is a review of Dropbox, because there are a lot of cloud applications that rely on it.

In a nutshell, Dropbox let's you store files in the cloud.

Dropbox is “freemium” service that allows you 2GB of storage for free. You can then pay for more space if you want to. Alternately, you can recommmend people, and if they sign up, you can get more space (click here to give me more space :).

Besides being able to store stuff (for free!) in the cloud, it has three really powerful features

It syncs your files across many different platforms, including a computer, smart phone and even the cloud. It will make sure that the latest version of the file is in all the locations and push the latest copy to your computer or phone (or the cloud).

A really remarkably feature is that it can go back in time and recover deleted files, as well as previous revisions. I have a text file (my todo list) that I update sometimes as much as 10 times a day. Dropbox allows me recover up to 35 revisions ago.

Another great feature that is not obvious at first is that allows you to share stuff, not just with other dropbox users, but on the web itself. You just put stuff in the shared folder, and you can you get a URL that you can send someone a link to (like this link).

Dropbox has become something of a standard. There are a ton of applications that will interact with Dropbox on multiple platforms. One app I use all the time on my phone is called todo.txt that interfaces with a file on Dropbox (the above mentioned todo list). It also interfaces with a ton of web apps. I will get into some of the cloud apps in later posts.