Ever wanted or needed a place to share expiring semi-private files, links, notes with yourself or others? That’s the service drop.io provides.

Just last week in our IRC chat a friend wanted me to look at how a site looked on my Mac. The only problem was my Mac wasn’t logged into the IRC, I was using a different Windows machine. While we discussed a modification to our custom IRC bot that would work — our system was essentially what drop.io already does (and drop.io does more) — we could have simply used drop.io has a place to store the shared link.

What can you use drop.io for?
You can use drop.io to share up to 100MB worth of something per address: files, links, notes. You can even send email to your drop.io address.

drop.io optional features
Using drop.io is simple to use and requires no registration or email address. Optionally you can choose to:

1. name the CODE (minimum of 7 alphanumeric characters) for the drop.io address (drop.io/CODE). The code must not be already taken. You can purchase a code for $7.89 to allow an additional 1GB of space or reduce the code to 2-6 characters, say for example you wanted to have something like drop.io/hmm (that’s already taken by somebody).
2. add a password to your drop.io address to make it more private. Default is no password.
3. define the amount of time for the drop.io address to live from one day to one year. Default is one month. When your drop.io address is about to expire, you can manually extend the time if you want.

You can create one now by visiting the drop.io home page which also serves as the creation page and filling out the form fields: name the drop, password protect (optional), delete drop after time (optional, default 1 month), others can options (view, view & add notes or default: view & add notes and files).

EXAMPLE
Here is a drop.io I created as an example if you don’t want to create your own that contains the default time (1 month), default others can options (view & add notes and files) and has been password protected.

This is not private and you can do whatever you want playing around with it, subject to the drop.io terms of use.

http://www.drop.io/z8u8dyt - code created randomly by the system
optional password created: test123 - you’ll need this code to access the dropio to view what’s there

Since this is open and anybody can do anything with it, including hack the admin password and delete the drop page altogether (I intentionally didn’t make the admin password very difficult to guess, so not meant as a challenge of any kind), you might be best served just creating your own page. However if it hasn’t been vandalized too much, you should see something similar to the screenshot above which contains examples for notes, links, pictures and a recent Hmmcast. It isn’t set so that media can be deleted, so the media I uploaded should be there by the time you read this and you’re welcome and encouraged to add something of your own, if you like. Call this a community test page.

About the admin features
When logged in as the admin to your drop.io created page, you can perform the following additional functions:

1. Destroy drop - this dumps the whole page and all the contents including files, links and notes
2. Change the following:

Drop Address
User Password - that’s the test123 in the example above
Admin Password
Drop Expiration - change up to one year from the current date
Other Users Can Add - change the permissions for the drop page
Other Users Can Delete Media - by default only those with the admin password can delete media
First Page Displayed - by default this is “Media View” shown in the screenshot above. Other choices: chronological view and interactive view

3. Upgrade Drop to Premium - as mentioned earlier, if you pay $7.89 you can upgrade to allow changing to 2-7 code names and expands the storage from 100MB to 1GB of storage space.

Summary and thoughts
drop.io has a very clean, user-friendly design. No advertisements were seen anywhere on the site which leaves me thinking the entire business plan is based on hoping/planning enough people upgrade to premium. Nothing wrong with that if there’s enough demand. With the abundance of free web space out there these days, but not the convenience of a service like drop.io, they might be onto something.

I also didn’t see any API, bookmarklets or widgets. Seems like a natural to have at least a bookmarklet for adding stuff to one’s drop.io space. Maybe that’s one of the features you get if you upgrade to premium or coming in the future?

Among a sea of web-based services drop.io stands out as being one of the more useful ones. I like it and bookmarked and will probably use here and there.

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