Dropbox Needs a “dropbox”
Posted January 9th, 2015 @ 03:40pm by Erik J. Barzeski
You want to send a file to a friend. They have Dropbox. You have Dropbox. Cool, right?
Dropbox is not entirely well named, because unfortunately, you can't easily "drop" something on someone else's Dropbox.
Instead, you have to upload the file to your Dropbox, give your friend the URL, await confirmation that your friend got it, and then delete it from your Dropbox.
Why not allow me to set aside 200 MB or 2 GB or whatever size I want to act as an actual "dropbox" for people to share files with me (or for me to share with them)?
There aren't even any real good solutions to allow this. Search for "uploading to a friend's Dropbox" or "allow uploads to my Dropbox" and the best you'll get are some third-party hacks (and some cost money).
Lame. C'mon, Dropbox. You can do this…
Posted 03 Mar 2015 at 9:58am #
My account is linked with that of a couple friends and my father and wife. If my father wants to send something to me, he puts it there, then I see it in the shared folder and move it to where I want it. He doesn't have to check in with me and remove it later, because that is literally a shared filesystem: it is in both accounts (and it counts against both users' quota), or not in either account.
Posted 03 Mar 2015 at 10:09am #
I'm not talking about shared folders. I use those too. I'm talking about one-off "oh, you need this large file?" type interactions. Or even semi-anonymous type interactions, where I might want to let someone give me a file, or I might want to send one to someone else.