Latest Cool Toy: Dropbox, both local and global!


I hate people who send huge e-mail attachments. It really clogs up our antiquated e-mail server. So when one of our fine graduate students asked me what she should do instead of e-mailing a large attachment, I first told her to use some standard file sharing site like SendSpace or RapidShare, but I also told her a neat service set up on campus at our business school. I remembered it was called "dropbox" something so I googled it and found it, dropbox.olin.wustl.edu. That is a nice service for those of us at Wash U, but it would be neat if such a service were available for the world... but it is! In my google results I found another site, which anyone can use and can store 2GB of space for free, similarly named DropBox. One of the first neat things I realized about it was it actually had a download executable for Linux which immediately made a positive impression on me! I grabbed it and installed it on my Ubuntu box and it worked flawlessly. It also worked fine on my XP laptop (as expected) and when I would copy a file on one system into the DropBox folder, it would magically appear on both systems, just like a Windows share, and it would also show up on the web interface. Neat! It also works on Mac OSX, but I have not installed in on my iMac at work yet. And, yes, you can drop files there and then make them public and e-mail a link to anyone in the world so you do not have to send some 40MB attachment. They make it easier than anybody else I have seen. And if you want 2.250GB free instead of the standard 2GB free, you can just use my one magical link (which earns me an extra 250MB each time someone signs up), which is:

https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTE1NjMxMTY5

File sharing has never been easier!

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