Dropbox as a Social Media Platform

A few months ago, I visited some family to scan a bunch of pictures that my grandmother had collected.  I scanned over 1200 pictures.  To share this with my family, I put all the pictures into my Dropbox and shared that folder with my family.  This experiment turned out to be an amazing success.

Fast forward a few months and now I have a new source of pictures.  I am taking a bunch of pictures of my newborn son.  I'm not the only one, though.  My brother and the son's grandparents are taking lots of pictures as well.  I turned back to Dropbox as a way for the family to share pictures.  I created a folder in my Dropbox.  I loaded it with all the pictures that I took.  I shared that folder with all of my family with a message telling them to upload any pictures they took.  Most of my family is tech savy enough to handle Dropbox.  Everyone jumped on board.  People started uploading photos and to my surprise....video!  Every has access to the full quality original photos.  Best of all, it is all private and secure.

Most people tend to use Facebook to share photos like this.  There is a problem with that.  It is my opinion that when you upload a photo to Facebook, even with the strictest of privacy settings, that photo is completely open to the entire world.  I do not trust Facebook with the private of my son.  Couple this with the fact that a lot of my family does NOT have Facebook, it made perfect sense to use Dropbox as the media sharing platform.  Dropbox allows my family to share full quality photos with a high level of privacy.  In the end, that is all we wanted out of the platform.  It has turned out well.  So well, that I am now considering paying for Dropbox.  Imagine that.  A company provides a good free service so some people want to pay for an upgraded version of that free service.