Promoting your stuff on Facebook is all very well, but what if you want to offer downloads (such as for music) from within the platform? Oddly, German startups are all over this problem. Out of Berlin has recently come Pipe. Yet to launch, this is an app which promises to send files up to 1GB to Facebook friends in real-time and without leaving a trace. Although it’s only available to Facebook users, there are a billion of those of course. It’s an eagerly awaited startup. And now Dropify has appeared – founded in Cologne in May, 2011 by Alex Heilmann, Mike Lieser and Chris Striepecke. Again, this integrates with Facebook and lets you publish and discover files, making them more social, allowing files to be shared in quite a viral way across Facebook.
After connecting your Facebook account with the Dropify Web app you upload a file (PDF, Doc, audio/video file etc, add some meta data information. You can then publish the file and also embed it in Facebook. The file can then be downloaded from Facebook by anyone who it’s shared with.
Now, there is potential for this to go viral because Dropify creates an activity feed post when files are downloaded, making links to files spread fast on Facebook. Musicians and perhaps even developers are going to like this, a lot. Furthermore, downloads from Dropify are compatible with mobile devices.
Dropify is free but you can also subscribe for more features from between $9 to $99 per month, allowing you access to more uploads, larger file sizes and the ability to get analytics about how the files are performing.
The potential for these apps to create a new wave of Facebook-based file-sharing is clear, just keep it clean kids, m’kay…?