Yes, it's great for that purpose, except when two ore more people edit too vigorously at the same time. E.g. a file is updated by your friend, while you're working the same file open in an editor. When you save, you overwrite his changes.

If you have a solution to this problem, let us know... :)

My immediate reaction, having never heard of Dropbox, was "why not just use SVN".

What I love about Dropbox is that you don't have to check in/check out every time you make the slightest change. The versioning is implicit, which is the way it should be for most personal files (although it would be a disaster for SCM).

I've been using Dropbox to sync shell configuration files across several (4+) machines and it's a dream come true. I now have versioned bashrc files, my vim plugins, on every machine.

I'm currently using Dropbox to sync my todo list (ActionGear on Mac) with my other Macs, as well as my Adium preferences and chat history. So useful.

SVN is for version control of files. Dropbox is simply for sharing/syncing files where you don't need a full history.

I use it on my laptop/home/work computers. If I have a file I need on another computer rather than vpn into work and send it over or ftp into a server and drop it there to pick it up later I just throw it in the dropbox and it syncs to all computers. It's nice.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that dropbox does keep a version history of your files. I just don't use that particular feature.

You could get basically the same service, but uglier and slower, via webdav_svn and Trac. I did that for a while back in ~2005, but man was it slow. Maybe today, you could use Git with a cronjob that autocommits, pulls and pushes every minute or on mtime changes.