As time goes by, my titles become more and more descriptive. By reading only the headline, you actually already know the gist of it, so you might as well move on.

Unless of course you don’t have a clue what box.net is, what GMail does and what the hell a 3rd party app constitutes. In which case I’ll gladly clear that up for you.

Box.net is an online storage service (meaning you upload stuff to their servers, so you can access it from wherever you are). They’ve been around for ages (meaning around two years, which in web2.0 terms is more than just ages, it’s eons). They provide a stable service, and over time have added new features like the ability to share your files with others, hence creating a social-network based on the sharing of your files. And a short while back they opened up their platform, allowing other applications to be used with the files uploaded to box.net. One such example is the integration of picnik.com, a webbased image editor (also the official editing tool for Flickr).

And today they announced support for not only Outlook (which hopefully will perish sometime in the next five years) but also GMail (which hopefully will take over the world within the next five years).

What does that mean for you, the user? It means you’ll now be able to upload files to box.net and then send them to other people via GMail (or Outlook). Which is not exactly how it works, as box.net doesn’t exactly make GMail send the file, it just automates the process of publishing the file and then sending the link to the file to someone else. Fair enough.

So while that doesn’t sound like a revolutionary new service, it makes life a bit easier, which, in the end, is the only thing we expect from the web.