The Log

Droplr was officially launched last night and is now available to the general public.

I’ve been using either Droplr or Cloud for the past 3 months and both are great tools. But Droplr comes out ahead in a few ways. For those who haven’t caught the bug yet, or who struggle to grasp how to make use of this type of a tool, here’s a list of things I regularly use Droplr for.

1) Shorten URLs — every link I post in Twitter comes from Droplr. This way I can track what I’ve shared and how often it’s been clicked. Other URL shorteners do this for you, but Droplr includes this service in with everything else it does.

2) No more attachments — do you have files that you regularly attach to emails? Rather than make slow emails, just upload your file to Droplr and include the link in the email.

Every Fusion customer gets a copy of our advertiser kit — a zip file that comes in just under 1 MB. Not a big deal, but for someone with expensive bandwidth, I count every MB. And so with TextExpander and Droplr, I have a succinct piece of text that shares our ad kit with every potential customer that comes across our inbox.

And at a fraction of the bandwidth.

3) Blog posts — I’ve started using Droplr to host miscellaneous items that might make their way into a blog post. It’s so much more enjoyable to work within the Droplr interface than the WordPress backend.

Updates to the Beta

For those who were using the Droplr beta, the new version that was released last night has some great updates that I’ve enjoyed for the past week.

1 - Sharing a piece of code in a note comes with some great default formatting.

2 - When sharing a file, rather than automatically download when clicked, the user is taken to a page where they have the option to download if desired. This is a more polite way to treat the user in my mind. (Update: the gents at Droplr informed me that you can still include a direct link to the file simply by adding a + to the end of the Drolpr link)

3 - My favorite change is the progress indicator in the menubar. Rather than the three dots as in the beta, the new version rotates like a clock. A beautiful touch.

4 - A list of recent uploads. This is a nice way to easily access the items you’ve recently shared.

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Two other items of note that I enjoy with the app:

1 - The ability to type a quick note and upload to the service. I’m not exactly sure how I’d put this feature to use yet, but it seems like a good option to include.

2 - The inclusion of stats on the Droplr web interface. It’s been very helpful to get the breakdown of what kinds of items I’ve shared and how often they’ve been viewed/clicked/downloaded.

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With new web and desktop apps coming our way so frequently, it’s easy to become numb to it all. But I say you ignore this tool at your expense. It has changed a few aspects of my workday, and for the better.

Check it out.

• #web
• #sharing