Drop It Like It's Hot. Facebook Acquires Drop.io


Facebook has acquired the file sharing/storage site Drop.io according to a post on the company blog.  The service will be shutting down on December 15th, 2010.  Yet again, Facebook is acquiring startups for talent, technology, and assets only to leave the startup to die (e.g. Friendfeed) or just to shut it down (e.g. essentially every other company they have acquired).

From Drop.io’s blog post:

Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve struck a deal with Facebook.  What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be winding down the drop.io service. As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but you’ll be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally.  After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.

Drop.io makes it clear that no user data will be transfered over to Facebook and that all data will be deleted after Dec. 15th. For those of you unclear of what type of service Drop.io provides it is essentially an online collaboration and file sharing service that provides users with a simple, real time and private way to chat and share images, video, audio, documents along with other digital content through sharing points called “drops”.

Which leads us to the question, how long until we see Drop.io integration into Facebook? Do you use Drop.io? What do you think of this acquisition?