New storage service - Windows Live Folders

[Ankur Mittal]

While news on the "Live Drive" front has been rather non-existant of late, there are some signs that may be about to change. A new service, Windows Live Folders beta, was recently listed on the Windows Live Feedback site, though it was only a matter of days before it was removed. While it doesn't take a genius to work out this is likely to be a storage service, the question is what will it be? A revamped FolderShare, the "Live Drive" cloud storage service everybody has been waiting for, or a combination of both?
The initial details being discussed at TechEd last year were for a cloud storage service offering 2GB of space for free. Looking at services that have been operating in this market for a while, this figure seems to be lower than what will eventually be offered. Xdrive currently offers 5GB for free and 50GB for $9.95 a month but without the economies of scale that Microsoft can draw upon. (The newest Microsoft datacenter opened in Quincy at the end of last month and more are on the way.) Interestingly enough, the online Apple service .mac is still offering a basic service of just 1GB for $100 a year and a total of 4GB for another $100 a year. With Windows Live Hotmail offering a 2GB inbox (Hotmail Plus 4GB), it definitely makes sense for a Windows Live cloud storage service to offer significantly more than this.
The other key feature that was talked about last year is being able to map your online storage to your PC so you can access it as you would any other drive. The existing Windows Live Messenger feature, Shared Folders, does this already for peer-to-peer sharing, so perhaps this is where the name Windows Live Folders comes in.
To save our intrepid readers from doing this themselves, folders.live.com currently points to the new Windows Live beta site. One question I do have is how would people use a cloud storage service and therefore how much storage space would they need - would you pay for more if the price was right?



After the intial signin to the service, the user is presented with the Folders homepage, showing the 3 folder types that can be created, as well as some default folders and a storage capactiy meter. After creating your own folders, these will appear on your homepage too. My storage meter says 250MB for the time being the beta should have more.
Windows Live Folders it not a difficult to use service, folder creation is straightforward, as it the uploading of files. Microsoft is aiming Windows Live Folders towards a large as market as possible, so the basic procedures need to be simple to promote adoption amongst the less tech-savy. The use of ajax to create new folders is nice, though the rest of the site could do with a little too. As we've seen with Windows Live Hotmail though, too much of a good thing can be bad.
Where Windows Live Folders gets slightly more technical is around folder options, in particular sharing folders between your friends. The process however is similar to sharing your Windows Live Spaces between friends, with the difference being you can chose the role of your friends - either reader or contributer. Much like with FTP services, reader only allows the contact read access to the folder and files, whereas contributer allows them to upload, edit and delete files as well. Creating publicly available files is as easy as private files and once you're done, its a one-click process to share them via email.

While Windows Live Folders appears to be a very basic service at the moment, that will surely change of the coming months, especially if a client is forthcoming. Performance and usability is probably the highest we've seen for any Windows Live beta, so the future definitely looks good.

information from -liveside

[alsiladka]

Saw this on liveside before, but MS will have to put in a lot to beat Xdrive!!

Been using Xdrive for months now, and really impressed. Hope MS beats Xdrive, as we would be the ones who would get more then

[gxsaurav]

Looks like Yahoo briefcase, just 5 years late

Well good thing though, the Windows Live ecosystem looks good so far

[iMav]

well thts y i like windows ... evrything is integrated ... solid hai ... i am patting myself tht i never abandoned my hotmail account

[Zeeshan Quireshi]

well MS system is well integrated n i trust MS more than AOL

btw the prob i face with XDrive is that it's web-upload feature is very very bad.

[navjotjsingh]

Quote from LiveSide

Just a few more points on Windows Live Folders:

* The Windows Live Folders homepage is now offline.
* The beta has not started and there is no signup page yet either. Subscribe to our RSS feed if you want to know when this is available.
* The 500MB storage being offered during the beta is unlikely to be the final figure. Why tip the game away to competitors during the beta phase before it launches?

Also, I admit that I used the codename "Live Drive" as opposed to the correct name "Sky Drive" as the former has a well defined (if wrong) concept outside of Microsoft. We tried before to correct this error but it didn't work. Blame Ray Ozzie for that one

So MS is delaying this further.