Facebook offers file sharing for all groups

Facebook's involved in a lot of projects right now. While ramping up for their big IPO that's scheduled for later this month, they've also been working on their mobile applications and now, is offering a competitor file sharing service to Dropbox. According to Mashable, Facebook launched a feature last month called Groups for Schools where individual colleges could create their own groups and students and faculty could exchange files, create events and message each other. To join the group, each individual needs to register with an active .edu email address. Within the main college group, sub-groups can be made for specific programs and clubs at the college or university. This move is reminiscent of when Facebook first launched as a college only social network.

Will share your files

Facebook has further revealed that now, all groups will be able to send files from member to member, similar to the services Dropbox offers. The feature rolled out to a small number of groups yesterday and more groups will have access over the next few days. Users will be able to upload most file formats to a limit of 25 MB (the same file size limit that Gmail imposes). Of course, Facebook is aware of the major copyright violations that will take place once this service opens up and they've made it so that music files and .exe files will not go through. Ebooks, comics, music videos and short movies will work though.

As with quite a number of their features, the file sharing ability potentially comes from an acquisition Facebook made in October 2010 of a file sharing service called drop.io. This service did not require users to register to send files across. They just had to upload a file, and create 'drops' with links to the file to share with friends, relatives, professors, or whoever they may need to share with. Drop.io also provided a free conference call service, so it will be interesting to see whether Facebook will incorporate this ability as well. The social network is already planning video calling, in partnership with Skype, for its Facebook Messenger applications. Will you share files using Facebook's service? Or is the file size limit too limiting? Let us know in the comments section below.