PIPE a new facebook app to transfer file upto 1GB to your friends !

Facebook is great for sharing thoughts, links, complaints and pictures with your friends, family and colleagues but, until now, there has been no easy way to share files through the social network. Now Let us come to it’s new app “PIPE” which lets you transfer files in real time to your friends.It will soon be available for the use.

It’s been in invitation-only mode for a year, but Pipe CEO Simon Hossell told us the time has been put to good use: a secure locker-like feature has been added to take into account those who aren’t online to receive the file at the time of sending, and relay technology has been added in order to help the service bypass corporate firewalls.

It’s really quite simple. You install the Pipe app in Facebook and drag-and-drop to send a file to a friend – if they’re not already using Pipe, they’ll receive an invitation to do so. Files get sent through peer-to-peer (P2P) connections, so nobody – including Facebook and Pipe itself – can snoop.

As mentioned above, if the recipient isn’t online at the time of sending, then the file can be stored for a while, to give them a chance to download it. The file will only be held for 5 days and it’s limited to a size of 100MB per contact (the file size limit for P2P transfers is a hefty 1GB) – in a sense, this is a more literal interpretation of the “dropbox” concept than Dropbox itself has turned out to be.

Not that Hossell sees what Pipe is doing as competition to Dropbox and email. “We’re not suggesting people will be abandoning other ways to send files,” he told me. “This is just such an easy way to send a file. You have access to everyone who’s close to you; you don’t even need to know their email address.”

The desktop version of Pipe comes first, although Hossell said an iOS version was nearly ready and Android may follow.

So will it fly? As Hossell pointed out to me, the last year has seen a lot of work go in to make sure Pipe works as advertised from the start. The app certainly looks set to exploit Facebook’s network effect, so perhaps everything really is now in place for Pipe to take off – if people want another way to send files, that is.