Dropbox Goes Social: Introducing Documents Preview and Photo Sharing
Popular cloud storage service Dropbox, announced yesterday that it’s slowly rolling out two new features to its users which will further ‘socialize’ this service. Dropbox hopes that this move will propel them towards dominating cloud storage market as new services such as Kim Dotcom’s Mega or box.com impose different set of features which users find useful. And let’s face it, who wouldn’t be excited about 50 GB of free storage space?
Edit Before Downloading
The first new feature comes as an option to work with documents before downloading them. After clicking on a specific document, a pop-up window will appear which will let users preview the file. Supported files are PDF’s, .doc and .docx as well as PowerPoint. However Excel is not supported at this moment, and these features are not yet available on mobile apps but should be eventually.
Share Multiple Pictures and Albums
Second product or feature is much more interesting as it takes on the problem of sharing and managing pictures. Nowadays most of us keep our dearest photos on Facebook where we let our friends see them and leave comments. Despite this, we tend to take much more pictures than even before which results in gigabytes of data we just don’t want to constantly keep on our profile. Not with Facebook’s privacy policy at least.
I personally keep all my private photos on Dropbox. Some of them I want to share only when I feel like it’s the right moment but I like the ability to do it from any device I use at that moment. Whether it’s my iPhone or my laptop, I can always manage the content, and with the recent automatic upload feature I know that all of my photos are right there moments after I take them.
Considering the amount of people who keep their photos in the cloud, Dropbox also announced a new feature which enables sharing multiple pictures and albums via email or through social networks like Facebook or Twitter. It doesn’t matter if your photos are organised in folders or not, the service will collect all of them in one place thus giving you the option to choose which one you want to share or manage. These features should be available over next couple of weeks for all of Dropbox’s 100 million users.
What this essentially means is that Dropbox is stepping away from being a simple file management service and is shaping up to become a serious sharing platform, one which will find its way into the ‘social’ side of the web.
Also worth noting is that Dropbox has lately been on a shopping spree when they acquired photo sharing service Snapjoy and just last month an audio service called Audiogalaxy. Are we hinting a possible cloud music service in the future?
