It’s not often that I come across a new online service that meets a need and adds value to my life. But when my friend Tim McAlpine told me about drop.io I was immediately hooked.

Working at a credit union, we have understandable security features in our system which prevents me from transferring files in the way I was accustomed to doing at the digital agencies at which I once worked. In the CU world I’m a bit of an anomaly – not many other people need to transfer large files across the interwebs. But as my year of conferences gets underway, I need to get 30-50MB presentations to the conference organizers, and don’t have an ftp site to use at work. (I had been using my own website, but that becomes cumbersome, because not everyone on the other end can retrieve from an ftp site.)

Enter drop.io. A simply web 2.0 utility, which is basically an online flash drive that anyone can create, anytime, as many times as they want. For free you can get 100MB and for $10 a year you can get 1GB.

You can create as many as you want, and upload whatever kind of files you want. You can put a password on it, or leave it open. You can email to a special drop.io address that you get with each drop, so you can drop attached files directly via email. You get a special phone number to leave messages and record them as a file in your drop. You can fax to your drop. You can even get widgets to so you can drop from your website, blog or social network. Oh, and with the RSS feed, you can be alerted when someone else drops something to you.

It’s a really streamlined concept, no accounts to manage, just start as many drops as you need. Did I mention that it’s friggin brilliant?

I have two little quibbles. It would have been nice to have a little question mark icon next to the password field, as I was confused between a drop password and an admin password until I got all the way through the set up, at which point I realized I had done it wrong, and had to delete my drop and start again.

The only problem with a non-account model (users start drops, they don’t set up accounts) is that if you forget your admin password, you can’t retrieve a lost password. You just have to abandon the whole drop and start again. I was annoyed by this until I saw it written explicitly in their FAQ:

I lost the drop’s admin password, help!

This is basically the equivalent of losing the drop address – sadly, no dice. Part of the ease and simplicity of drop.io comes from the fact that we do not require usernames or passwords. The downside to this is that if you lose your admin password we have absolutely no way to verify that you made a drop, and therefore that we should grant you access as an admin.

The good news is that if this happens in the absolute worst case scenario your drop will evaporate in less than one year. Again, just consider that drop.io is really more about flash online storage –make sure you have your stuff backed up elsewhere!

Somehow seeing that they knew about this issue and saw it as a feature and not a bug made me feel better, but still, this functionality would be very useful. Perhaps this will be introduced with the upgraded $10 service.

The amazing thing is that drop.io is smart. I added a video file that a conference organizer wanted of me speaking about my topic. I uploaded the .mov file to drop.io and it automatically treated it as a media file. Users can view the movie directly in my drop (like in the above screenshot), get an embed tag from the site or download it. Nothing to configure, it just does this automatically. Same with other types of media files. Brilliant.

So I just upgraded my drop (had to do this via paypal, as I don’t have a US address), so I can have more storage and to show my appreciation for this terrific service.

I’ve now used drop.io to get files from and to several different people, some of whom are not what I would call web-savvy. No issues, no problems, just a smooth transfer of files, and some questions about this cool, useful service.

So I’m in love. Drop.io solved a real need that I had, is easy to use, and is simply delightful. Thanks Tim!