Dropbox has announced via their blog that some awesome changes have been implemented that make sharing your stuff a lot easier. Dropbox users can now right-click anywhere in their Dropbox and grab a link to share files and folders willy-nilly all over the place.
Users have already been able to right-click in the Public folder to get the links they need to share individual files with others, but you can now use the same approach to share files from anywhere within Dropbox in the exact same way (so you don’t have to turf them in the Public folder if you don’t want to). What’s more, you can right-click a folder and share that with others so they can browse its contents like a gallery. Good for when you take a crapload of pictures from your nephew’s school play and every aged relative you have is asking for copies. Sharing files and folders in this way allows people to view without being able to edit (this is a good thing: If you want to share editing capacity, you can “Share Folder” in the way Dropbox already lets you), so it creates sweet little galleries or shares files as you need it to. They can download the file you’ve linked them to if they want to, but they can’t mess with your copies.
Dropbox is a free app and service that gives you 2GB to start (you can pay for an upgrade) and a whopping 500 MB every time you refer someone to the service. There are iOS versions as well, so you can do all this linking hocus pocus from your iPhone or iPad.
Interestingly, when Apple debuted its iCloud service, many pundits (Macgasm included) tempered praise of its cloud-based storage concept with comparisons to Dropbox, and most users still seem to agree that, with regard to ease of use, flexibility or storage space, it’s not yet Dropbox’s equal. There was talk that, at one point, Steve Jobs wanted to buy Dropbox, but it (obviously) didn’t pan out. Time will tell whether or not Apple’s tight-fisted approach to über-simplified services will be able to overshadow Dropbox… but it’s hard to argue that they’ve yet come close to that goal.