Stick this in your Pipe and share it

Pipe, a new file transfer app for Facebook has just launched and is looking to make the way files can be shared on the social networking service much easier.

The company released the first version of its Facebook file transfer app on Tuesday and while it uses the social platform for convenience, it doesn’t actually use it to transfer files – this is done directly by establishing a peer-to-peer connection instead.

Once the app is installed on Facebook, sending files using the service is easy enough, you simply drag and drop the files to be transferred into your Pipe, select a recipient and away it goes.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

“We’ve worked really hard to make Pipe this simple. Anyone can use it. The user just drops a file in the Pipe and their friend receives it. We’ve made the technology invisible,” Simon Hossell, Founder and CEO of Pipe, said.

File size is limited to 1GB and doesn’t require the sender and the receiver to have the app installed ahead of time (instead the receiver simply clicks a Facebook notification telling them that someone is trying to send them a file, at which point it also downloads the Pipe Facebook app) it does require both people to be online if you want to send files this large.

Sending files while one person is offline is also possible. It will go straight to that person’s ‘locker’ (storage space) but each locker is restricted to 100MB in size, although there is no limit to the number of lockers a user can have, Pipe said.

The sender can also specify the number of days the file will remain in the locker – either one, three or five days.

In The Next Web’s testing the app seemed incredibly easy to use and we’re impressed that single file transfers are only capped at 1GB, although a 100MB per locker limit puts a dampener on any large file transfers for people who are not online.

On the plus side, as a result of its integration with Facebook, Pipe makes sharing files with non tech-savvy friends and family all the easier.

To try it out for yourself, you can download the app from the Facebook App Center or simply click the link of any files shared with you from friends to get started.

There’s no mobile app versions as yet, but it won’t be too long before the iOS and Android versions of the Pipe app are ready for the prime-time, Hossell told The Next Web. He added that it was more important to first get people used to the service and how to use it before launching the Pipe mobile apps.

The release is the culmination of a long restricted beta test that first started in around March 2011 when the 10-person, Berlin-based team was founded. Later, in May 2012, Pipe extended the private beta to include some organisations and people that had requested access to the service.

Image Credit: Thinkstock 

➤ [Pipe]