Dropbox earlier this year launched a feature that automatically uploads photos from Android phones to Dropbox folders. Little fanfare. It is testing a version for Apple's iOS devices. Today Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston is making some noise about a new feature. The news: Dropbox is releasing a feature that lets people share folders of any sort with a simple link.
This comes just as Google's much-anticipated rival cloud storage service looks likely to go live this week. Apple's offering, iCloud, has been out for less than a year. In February Apple CEO Tim Cook said his company's service was being used by 100 million people already.
Houston sees this new addition to Dropbox as yet another step toward making our digital lives flow more easily between the myriad of hardware and software combinations that make simple tasks, like sharing, a big headache. "It has bothered us how hard it is to share things. The number of steps is a lot. Yet people just suffer through it as if it has to be this way," he told me.
Houston has long viewed Dropbox as the easy-to-use answer to our more vexing daily technology challenges. To read more about him and Dropbox, see my cover story from a few months ago.
What exactly does sharing now include in Dropbox? It remains a somewhat limited experience. You can still invite people to see and edit documents in a folder. Or you can use a so-called public folder inside Dropbox as a sort of dumping ground for documents you'd like to share. What is new is a remarkably straight-forward sharing tool that creates a unique, private URL for any file or folder. When you share that URL with someone they can open the document but not edit it. The sharing is "read-only". They can, however, go ahead and email that link to someone else -- with or without your permission.
Houston says Dropbox has been using the tool internally for months to share recruiting and sales documents. The idea for this kind of sharing was prompted by Dropbox customers, he explains. Businesses using Dropbox For Teams wanted better read-only sharing.
I pressed him on the security issues around having a link that can quickly spread even if the original creator of the content didn’t intend it to be shared widely. I suggested this tool is only for the daily flow of files, but not the sensitive information of a company, or individual. His response: “We’ve used for everything at Dropbox and not run into any issues.” Dropbox’s competitors in the business software space — Box, YouSendIt, and Intralinks, among others — will have a different view, no doubt.
Putting the obviously crucial security issue aside, there is something amazingly refreshing going on here, and it is core to Houston's long-term view for Dropbox. You'll be able to send someone a link to any sort of file, from a Flip camera video clip to a Microsoft Power Point, and they'll be able to view the content in their browser. If this works, it removes the tyranny of client software and device fragmentation.
We've all experienced this. Just last week a friend sent me a video of our toddler swim class using Apple QuickTime. I don't have QuickTime installed on my work PC. Then my friend uploaded the video to a special sharing service site. She sent me the link. I didn't feel like signing up for yet another service I'll use once.
With Dropbox's sharing link, that clip should just play, regardless of software type. The recipient doesn't even have to have a Dropbox account. "We have tried hard to make this really simple," says Houston.
And on the subject of Google's upcoming rival service Houston wouldn't say much: "Rumors have been flying since 2007. I won't know what it means until it's out there."
