Quicklook: Frenzy, Dropbox-driven social network for your Mac (hint: it's great)

What, you haven’t heard of Frenzy, a private social network for your Mac built atop Dropbox cloud storage? Now’s the time to give it a try as developer Aptonic Software announced the first public beta of Frenzy for Mac. You will need either a paid or free 2GB Dropbox account because Frenzy uses hidden Dropbox folders to let you share files, links and messages and track real-time updates via a Twitter-like stream of feed items. It’s a simple, elegant, lightweight and – above all – efficient way of collaborative sharing and commenting that works like a charm.

Your shared items and feeds get synced the next time you’re online, courtesy of the Dropbox backend that automatically updates all your authorized computers with fresh cloud content.

This saves you from the hassles of logging in to a web site in order to check out what’s new. Unlike other social networks, Frenzy is focused on private sharing with your closest friend and you always have ownership of everything you share because the items never leave your Dropbox folders – there are no other servers involved. Just pick your default sharing locations upon first run and you’re good to go.

Whenever you feel like sharing a page in your browser, just hit a customizable key combination to invoke an extension that pops up a dialogue where you can type in your optional message. Hit Send and Frenzy gets the job done and immediately returns focus back to the application you were using.

Moments later, all connected friends receive updates in their timeline. You can also post status updates, comment on other people’s items and share files from the Finder using a lightweight menubar application that sports unread count of new items that your contacts posted.

Of course, Frenzy is not a Facebook killer and it won’t replace other consumer social networks, such as LinkedIn or MySpace. It’s main purpose is to allow easy creation of private social networks with advanced content sharing capabilities.

This might come in handy for ad hoc projects at workplace that require additional capabilities beyond dumb file sharing, including real-time news feed, commenting, status updates and what not. Aptonic Software, the creator of Frenzy, is also behind Dropzone, a popular swiss army knife of drag and drop for the Mac. If you’re willing to take the plunge, download Frenzy now.