Facebook buys drop.io and shuts it down

I have the same reaction. It seems that, far too often, the first "big" coverage a neat service gets (if it's missed by TechCrunch or a well-ranked post on HN) is its purchase and subsequent closing. Obviously these businesses are valuable to someone, and making money is probably the end-goal of everyone involved, but it seems like customers are an afterthought when considering a sale. Should cloud-based services from companies without a stock market symbol start to be considered more "performance résumés" for the founders and less "stable options" for customers?

>"What moved me to post this: the other day folks here were discussing what hinders cloud service adoption. IMO, stuff like this does the most damage."

I completely agree. Speaking for myself, stories like this cause me to pause even more before joining, relying on, trusting, and eventually paying for any web based service.

You hit the nail on the head here, this is the new "Space" and massively valuable - very much an un-touch niche market. To be able to silently accumulate 10m happy users is hugely impressive. The analytical info on 10m active users (file types sizes etc) is why they shut it down, to absorb that info and change FB for the long term. Maybe a more private FB in future for users that don't want News Feeds etc.

I'd be wary, personally. Facebook bought divvyshot and shut it down, thereby creating a space in that market too -- that was then quickly filled by Facebook, as they reimplemented photos based on the work of the guys at divvyshot.

Even for a talent acquisition, I'd be very surprised if they bought these guys to do something other than reimplement the functionality of Drop.io integrated into FB.