The Ulitimate in Web 2.0 Apps: Drop.io

Dropio is an ultimate web 2.0 app. It’s free, it’s weird and cool at the same time, and you don’t even have to sign up! It has that anthropmorphic quality like Twitter in which it seems like it will be different things to different people. It’s billed as a “Simple Private Exchange”

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called “drops.”

So it was born out of the same idea as a Youtube. A simple way to share files between friends and groups. Like Twitter you can text in, but better than twitter you can even call in and leave a voice mail that will show up at the “drop.” It even gives you a special email address for your “drop” in which you can email in text, files, and photos. Also, better than Twitter, and like Pownce it has more payload. You can send in voice, pictures, Mp3s by phone, email, or directly from the internet. What’s really cool is that you can make your drop as private or public as you want it be. That way you could make one drop for a Twitter like blog for others to see, or semi-private where just a select few individuals could view, send, and exchange data, or totally private where one might keep sort of like a private diary.

That’s what I was thinking of it as because I’ve always thought that I need some “catch all” repository for ideas that I get on the fly. I’ve tried notebooks, but I end up having tons of notebooks all over the place and end up forgetting the information or not being able to find it when I want it.

The only thing it doesn’t have on Twitter is that it doesn’t send out information to cell phones, but you can receive an RSS feed. Still, one doesn’t get the sense that it is meant to compete with Twitter. I don’t know why I feel that, but I just do. Twitter still has this ineffable quality. Maybe because it just does one thing, I don’t know, or maybe because it is so simple to use and understand even compared to Dropio.

Others will use Dropio publicly like a blog, and like I said earlier, one of the coolest features is the voice call in. You get a telephone number and an extension with each drop. So you can have sort of instantaneous little podcasts on the fly, or just voice mail to everyone in your group as your ideas come to you on the fly. And, get this, you can even fax to and from the drop! Get rid of that fax machine that you use once a month!

I still haven’t figured out what the most creative way someone is going to use this feature and this site, but that’s part of the fun and I think it’s inevitable success. I think it will be the next “Twitter” coming out of SXSW.