I woke up this morning to a beta invite in my inbox for DropBox. There is no way the folks over at DropBox could have known it, but I actually had a specific need to transfer a significant amount of files between my PC and my MacBook Pro. I am leaving town tomorrow for a few days and this was high up on my ‘to do’ list for the day.

Needless to say I took this beta invite as a sign. (Chances are I signed up awhile back and just don’t remember.)

I got it up and running on my PC first since that is where the source files reside. As soon as I got that running and dropped my project files into my ‘DropBox’, it began to upload them to my account at www.getdropbox.com.

I didn’t even wait for it to finish, hell, it barely got started when I logged into my account on my MacBook and installed the software.

The MacBook started syncing right away, even while the PC was still uploading.

My MacBook prompted me to turn on the ‘Growl’ service and as a result I get friendly updates when DropBox has synced a file that has changed. The service is always running on both machines, which would normally be an issue for me, but so far it does not seem to use a great deal of system resources while it is idle.

The online interface is easy to use and allows you to Install the service on your machine, share your files with others, as well as the ability to upload directly within your browser. This allows you to upload a file from any machine, even if it isn’t one you have synced.

The ability to publish a public link to a file is a great feature as well if you want to share a file with more than one person…for most cases I will probably continue to email files instead of using this feature…that doesn’t mean I’m not stoked about it, just that I realistically will not take advantage of it in the near future.

For me, the beauty of this service is the multi-computer sync (especially between PC and Mac). I am increasingly making myself and my business more mobile and this service plays right into my strategy.

I think David over at the DropBox Forum said it best:

I’m sorry to have to say this, but considering Dropbox’s current feature set, I don’t think it can really be considered a real product until there’s a way to give it a hug. I mean… all this fancy stuff you’ve made so far is great ‘n all, but I feel this overwhelming urge to hug Dropbox for being so awesome.

Until you add some kind of feature to provide for this, I think you guys have really missed the mark.

I agree with his sentiments so far.

Has anyone else had a chance to use this service yet?