The Playground

You're at work or at a friend's house and you don't have a flash drive to save something to. Drop.io, an all-purpose file-sharing and communications service, delivers instant gratification. No registration is required: Just go to the site and type in a name (or a random collection of letters and numbers) to create a "drop"--in effect, a folder where you can park up to 100MB of pictures, videos, audio, documents, or whatever else you like.

You can also type notes or add URLs. Drop.io catalogues everything neatly, by content type. You can then share the drop URL (it will be something like 'www.drop.io/myfiles') with friends or colleagues, who can grab the content.

But there's more. You can send text messages from a mobile phone to your Drop.io e-mail address. Your friends can leave you voice mail by calling a phone number listed on the drop. And you can set up a teleconference, again by referring to a number shown on your drop. People can even send you a fax by using a provided cover sheet.

The nicest thing about Drop.io is its disarming spur-of-the-moment nature. You can set permissions for your drop (so that only authorised users can get in), or not. And you can set up as many drops as you need--and speedily dispose of them when you're done.