I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about Fluxiom, Vienna based file storage and sharing app for a few days now. I was always too busy, and now Michael Arrington from TechCrunch is stealing my thunder. Read his review and you’ll have a good idea of what mine would have been like (only without the number crunching in the end…my research would have stopped after comparing prices).
The only thing I might have added was that the service I’m currently using, namely Box.net, seems to be doing it all right: They’ve got sharing, they’ve got tagging, there’s a mass upload feature (through a Java applet…Michael Arrington seemed to have missed that when he wrote in his review that no other service provides mass upload). The good thing about this approach compared to Fluxiom’s? No need to zip!
They are also a lot more generous with their space, giving away 1GB for free, and 5GB once you’ve referred five friends.
I’d have really loved to like Fluxiom (they are from Vienna after all), but as they are that outrageously priced and their basic plan doesn’t even provide the features that would actually make them different from Box.net (full-text search, version check), I’d be crazy to actually pay that much money.
Well, just when I got used to the idea of using 30boxes, and exactly on the same day the people from webcalendar service Kiko shoot me an email that they’ve totally redone their service, Google’s long awaited Calendar is launched.
Now, I haven’t used Google’s calendar in depth yet, but frankly, it’s not a whole lot different from what Kiko and 30Boxes offer.
30Boxes is really extremely easy to use, it’s got a nice AJAX interface and the input is as intuitive as it can get. It doesn’t have any jazzy display options, but hey, it’s all about 30 boxes, so a day view really would break the whole thing.
I checked out Kiko as well, and it’s quite feature packed. It’s got a whole lot more options than 30Boxes, but it can be a whole lot more confusing as well. It does have a really nice AJAX interface, but their input is a bit more strict than the 30Boxes one.
Finally, new player Google Calendar really doesn’t overwhelm. It uses interface and AJAX features most GMail users have come to love, but strangely enough, there’s no GMail integration? What gives? I do think though they’ll add that soon.
All of these calendars offer sharing and collaboration features, as well as iCal and RSS functionality.
I guess I’ll just stick with 30Boxes for now though.
Once in a while I like showcasing new webservices I’m infatuated with. If you’ve come for the inane chatter usually prevalent in this spot, just skip this entry. More of that some other time.
The service I want to present today has been getting quite a bit of buzz lately, mainly because they’ve struck a few nice deals with other popular services. I’m of course talking about everyone’s darling web-storage company box.net (the really smart ones among you may have guessed that from looking at the picture in the top left corner). Now, what is so extremely nice about web storage? I mean, you don’t usually write an entry about that storage garage you’ve rented for your old furniture. Well, here’s the catch: it’s not simply web-storage, it’s web-storage in a web 2.0 manner (and it’s of course not furniture).
Web 2.0 you say? That buzz-word that’s been around for too long already? Well, yes, only that it’s not just a buzz-word but also an actual collection of distinct features. And these features can be observed in box.net, almost textbook style. Time for bullet points:
* Sharing: Yes, you can store your stuff and you can share it with your friends.
* Tagging: Although tags don’t get anyone excited anymore, they keep being helpful. Assign as many tags as you want to your files. That’s bound to make your life easier when you start having a lot of files stored.
* Ajax interface: A nice, clean interface sprinkled with piece of Ajax use. Very intuitive and lean.
* Rounded corners: No web 2.0 company can be taken seriously without them. Seriously. No, I really mean it.
Apart from these features, box.net also offers a bunch of other stuff that just make life easy (well, if your life consists of playing with web-storage services, but nevertheless). First of all, box.net offers 1 GB of free storage and 5 GB storage in their premium package. And if you’ve got a loyal circle of friends who don’t mind being spammed with invitations, you can actually be upgraded to their premium service simply by referring five friends. Even I managed to turn five people onto the service. And if I found five people, you can as well, trust me.
As I mentioned above, box.net is collaborating with a few other webservices, most notably Netvibes, the best of the starting pages currently around (here’s my entry about them from a while back). Thanks to their collaboration I can access the files I’ve got stored on box.net directly from withing my Netvibes starting page. Which is as easy as platform independent access to files can be implemented.
Overall it can be said that box.net is one of those services you never knew you’d need, but once you’ve used it for a while, you just won’t be able to do without.
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