It would be incredibly interesting if your dropbox machines all ran a bitorrent client that auto shared the syncing between them all.

With logic to determine which machines are closest (in bandwidth)

So that if I have my 5+ machines at home (desktops, laptops and phones, which all have the client on them) - they all see that they are on the same subnet and sync very fast between each other.

Then update the cloud at the same time - in the same fashion... chop all the changes up amongst the machines. (sure, I still have a single pipe via my cable modem - but this would be helpful when I am on work lan too...)

EDIT: it would be great to see an added layer of service on Dropbox such as the old Hamachi personal VPN services...

Eventually - Ill be able to have a completely distributed, virtualized personal network across any machine I have an account...

Windows Live Mesh, an equivalent Microsoft product, has the p2p sync functionality in addition to cloud sync.

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/product-review/how-to-li...

I dual boot most of my machines, so I find anything that is 100% windows only to be less than optimal.

But the tech is interesting.

It supports linux too, I've had it up and running on Mint and Ubuntu for at least 6 months.

fwiw, it supports Mac as well.

Dropbox already takes advantage of the local subnet if it can for synchronization... has for quite a while now.

Thanks, I didnt know this , was pretty obvious for them to do it that way.