Drop.io struck a deal with Facebook.  What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook.

In the coming weeks, they’ll be winding down the drop.io service. As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but will be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally.  After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.

Pretty aggressive considering Nov. 15 is half a month away and the close date is less than two months away. The biggest question is what will Facebook do with drop.io’s assets? Much like how photo sharing exploded via Facebook, creating yet another reason for people to login, so will file sharing. This is yet another move by Facebook to bring MORE of the Internet into the wall garden that is Facebook making it your one stop shop on the web. Now instead of just sending messages (and I truly believe that eventually Facebook will expose their messaging system as a REAL email system that can receive emails from the outside world – ex: paulspoerry@facebook.com), sharing photo’s, and posting content, users will be able to share files with one another. Imagine you have that new project you’ve been working on and that it’s the source to a Flash video project. This project contains a bunch of files, the source, images, audio, etc. You can simply use Facebook to send the entire batch of files, which would normally be too large for email, via Facebook. Eventually, Facebook could move into ‘cloud based storage’ as well. Doing something similar to LiveMesh, or the always talked about but still vaporware as of yet GDrive.