Parachute Beta is live!


I’ve FINALLY been able to sit down and complete dropbox (now PARACHUTE) code to a level I’m willing to release on a private beta basis. If all goes well, I’ll a release a public beta within a week. Sign Up Here.

Parachute? Am I jumping? What am I dropping? Links, sounds delicious doesn’t it? And it is, but with a twist, you don’t put in your own links. Parachute is designed so that you receive links from other people, right in your dropzone. Still don’t get it? Here’s how it works…

Let’s say Jill and Joel are best buds, Jill want to share a cool site about plants with Joel, but Joel has a job, and is working on something important so he can’t be bothered to read about plants, no matter how cool they are. He could accept the link from Jill and shove it in his favourites, or go to some other social bookmarking site, but he doesn’t want to divert his attention. Jill could always email it, but she doesn’t want to open her mail client and go through that hassle, so what do they do? Before Parachute they probably would forget about the stupid plants and carry on, foliagely unfulfilled. But now with Parachute, Jill can drop Joel the link, and then when he has more time on his hands, he can go through his new drops and have a leafy old time reading about plants.

What does all this mean? A better world, and probably more work done in offices, except for the people who just spend their time refreshing their box, hoping for some new drops. Eventually we would like to see our parachute all over the web, instead of “emailing this link to a friend” why not drop it to their account with a click and a lot less typing? Plus with the Parachute your friends know that you’re not accidentally signing them up for spam.

thanks to notian for that copy, he’s a much better writer than i’ll ever be