Dropbox: Community Building through File Syncing

Dropbox is the easiest way to sync your files over all of your devices. This includes your work computer, desktop, mobile phone, and any other computers you want to sync with. Devices always seem to break at the most inconvenient times, but with Dropbox, your files won’t be lost. The “cloud” is the future of Web 3.0 and beyond, where less and less is stored on your personal hardware. While cloud storage is not new, Dropbox offers one of the most developed, yet intuitively clean and simple cloud storage utilities. Once you install it on your computer, you simply drop your files into the new Dropbox folder found in the Favorites section of Windows Explorer, so you don’t have to go out of your way to open up any other program or log into an account.

File syncing can be used on a personal level, by having all of your files backed up and easily accessible on the cloud, but the possibilities for collaboration with friends, family, and coworkers make this software particularly exciting. In your Dropbox folder there is a Public subfolder. This makes it easy to share files with a broad group of people in one place, at the same time, instead of tediously sending out individual files to each person. This grants affordances of consolidation of information, as well as the affordance of easily broadcasting or disseminating your multimedia and documents. The Public subfolder allows for community building through providing a curated list of files which are as visible or invisible to others as the user wishes. In addition to the Public subfolder, you can create other folders and share these folders with specific people or groups of people. This allows the user to control the information that is available to any given person. Once a folder is shared, all files added to the folder are automatically synced with everyone connected.

Speaking of community building, Dropbox’s website fosters the development of the larger community of all Dropbox users. It does this in two major ways, one being the traditional method of hosting community forums. This allows for users to create and enter discussions with other users as well as receive feedback from forum moderators. It has a personable yet still comfortably anonymous method for posting, in that posters are labeled by their real first name and last initial. The second, more innovative method Dropbox uses to promote community building is their Votebox. Votebox allows users to raise issues about the current software or suggest new innovations for Dropbox. After an initial suggestion is posted, others can vote in support of these innovations.

So you can look at Dropbox as an intuitive, customizable file syncing and cloud storage tool. However you can also look at as a new way to easily communicate with individuals and groups through user-friendly sharing of files. Updating Public or shared folders are automatic and hassle-free, so you are keeping the people that matter to you in the loop just as easily as you would save a file to a folder.