Late last year drop.io was purchased by Facebook. I had been using drop.io to provide a public “drop box” (not related to the other drop box service) where folks could upload files, as well as a (rarely used) chat area that lived at the bottom of the main page at justintylerwiley.com.
These canned services were really just the tip of the drop.io API stack iceberg, which was Google Wave-like in scope and technical complexity. Drop.io had some really talented and creative developers working for them and came up with a number of innovative features that as far as I know were never really fully utilized in the web community. They were one of the first to pioneer Javascript based XMPP transfer functionality, and I remember when Katie and I first ran across them in 2009 we were pretty convinced that we were seeing Web 3.0.
Dropbox and chat services have been discontinued, and I’m not sure what Facebook has in store for the team, but I hope it’s as original and interesting as drop.io.
