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.
Picnik, which I so elegantly discussed when it launched, today announced that they had opened up all the functions previously only available for paying members of the service. Here’s the TechCrunch post on it.
Well, I think that’s a fantastic move. With other webbased photo editing services cropping up like mushrooms in a humid forest on a spring day, this helps to really draw people to your service (and keep them there). I guess there was a reason why Flickr decided to partner with Picnik for direct editing of Flickr photos, and why Picnik is the default application to edit photos stored on Box.net.
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.
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