It looks like Facebook has plans to continue branching into areas of the social networking world that the company has yet to penetrate. Over the weekend, drop.io, a popular private content sharing platform, announced via their blog, that Facebook has made an acquisition deal with them that would effectively shut down the service as is. It is as of yet unknown what plans Facebook has in store for the new assets.
Drop.io is a content sharing service that allows users to set up “drops” for a specified amount of time and for a specified group of users to share various types of content. Free drops allow 100MB of storage, but you can pay for more. According to the blog post, as of this week, users will no longer be able to create new drops. Currently active drops will stay active until December 15, at which point the entire service will go dead.
Facebook’s acquisition of the company has analysts wondering what the goal really is with drop.io. The recent announcement of Facebook Groups had users jumping for joy at the prospect of sharing social media with only a specific subset of users in a meaningful and streamlined way. While the current groups solution isn’t ideal for many, and the opt-out structure of the service definitely can get irksome, the idea of sharing multimedia content with specific groups is something that could conceivably result from this purchase. According to PCWorld, Facebook looks like they may be more interested in the developers rather the actual IP that the company offers, offering another argument for an integrated media sharing technology rather than a standalone Facebook service.