When Dropbox came out, it made sharing files and folders with your friends effortless. You can just put stuff in a folder and then you know that at some point the same stuff will turn up in your friends folder. It’s also private, so no one but the people you choose are able to see the contents of that folder.
The problem is, Dropbox lacks some of the more social aspects to sharing with each other. In a lot of cases, sending someone a file also needs an explanation to go along with it, and it would also be nice if the recipient could reply directly about what was shared. Of course you could do this bit by email, but it would be much nicer to be able to write a message to go right along with the thing you shared.
Frenzy lets you do just this. You simply drag a file or folder onto the menu item and Frenzy pops up and asks you which groups of people you want to share with.
Lets see a real world example of this:
Say I have some design sketches I want to get feedback on. First I drag the folder onto the Frenzy menu item:
The main Frenzy window pops up and asks which groups I want to share it with. Groups are simply the Dropbox shared folders that I have setup. You can invite new people to a shared folder or remove someone via the Dropbox web interface.
You can have multiple people in each group, or just one person as in my ‘Jason’ group. In this case, I select the Design group. I press enter or click share and the folder is copied to the Dropbox folder for syncing and my item is added to the feed:
My friends will now see the item I shared in their feeds.
When I receive replies, the number of new messages will be shown in red on the Frenzy menu item:
But Frenzy isn’t just for sharing and discussing files and folders. You can also share links with Frenzy.
To share a link, goto a site in your favorite browser and then use the Frenzy keyboard shortcut. The default is Control+Option+S. You can customize this shortcut in the Frenzy preferences.
You can also use the keyboard shortcut to reply to links already shared in the timeline.
For example, if Karen shares a link with me, I can click on the link and it opens in my browser. Now I can use the keyboard shortcut and Frenzy detects this item has already been shared so it will treat this as a reply:
Alternatively, I can click in the area indicated above to re-share this link with a different group. If I want to re-share this link with the family group for example:
Frenzy is available for download here. It is now completely free and open source.
There is a getting started guide here to help you get setup.
If you have questions email support@aptonic.com