However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

Over on The Next Web, blogger Alex Wilhelm thinks the increased storage space hints at Google's future plans with their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. We have to admit, the same thought occurred to us as well. After all, netbooks don't typically have the same hard disk space as their larger, less totable counterparts. However, that's not always the case these days given the new middle-of-the-road offerings like the HP Mini 311, for example, which falls somewhere between an ultra-portable netbook and full-sized notebook with its 350 GB hard drive option.

But Alex has a point: by providing this type of cloud storage solution, netbooks can remain basic machines which are smaller and cost less. That would pave the way for the Google Chrome OS line of netbooks to be even more affordable devices than what's on the market today since they wouldn't need to come equipped with large hard drives.

Obviously, an OS-integrated cloud storage system of this nature would be a natural fit for Google's cloud operating system designed specifically for netbooks. And yet, it still seems to be an incomplete offering at this time.

But Still So Limited!

As much as we want to believe that the new changes are a sign of Google's plans for Chrome OS, it's just as possible that they're nothing more than the great discounts they appear to be. There's nothing all that new being introduced here - just better rates and more available space.

Sadly, the core storage offering itself is unchanged. It's still very limited, only encompassing Gmail and Picasa photos. What about the rest of our files - like the ones stored in Google Docs? What about our music and movie collections? What about the hundred or so of home videos we can't bear to delete from our hard drives? Google has no centralized solution for any of this yet. And many are beginning to wonder if they ever will.

In the tech community, there have been rumors about an all-encompassing online storage service called GDrive for years on end now, and yet, nothing has ever come of it. According to speculation (and wishful thinking), the supposed system would allow for the upload of all types of files and would tie together all of Google's services.

In our imaginations, we envision a dashboard that links us to our online Google Docs, our photos, our Gmail, our Google Sites, and our multimedia content. The GDrive of our dreams would be accessible from any computer, keeping in sync all our user data, preferences, and settings. You can see a hint of how this sync could work with the way the Google Chrome web browser stores your favorites. Your bookmarked sites are now available in the browser no matter what PC you use while a backup copy sits in Google Docs. GDrive should do the same, but not just for web browser favorites - for everything. That would be the final step for making a cloud OS a reality.

It's almost strange at this point that Google hasn't released something of the sort yet. In fact, they've let Microsoft beat them to the punch in this instance courtesy of Microsoft's SkyDrive service which launched back in early 2008. SkyDrive offers a free 25 GB of online storage for your files and also serves as the central repository for Windows Live Photos as well as the documents created via the new Office Web Applications service, Microsoft's challenge to Google Docs. But where's Google's answer to this? When will it come? Will it ever?

Perhaps the company is waiting for the release of Google Chrome OS to dazzle us with some sort of revamped interface for a game-changing cloud computing operating system. Or perhaps the company is just doing what it does best: offering solutions that are simply good enough.

Then, depending on your computer (Mac or PC), you can either download the Windows-only desktop client or head over to the online service at quanp.net. Unfortunately, non-Windows users using the online service miss out on the sexiest thing about this new service: the 3D file browser.

For Windows Users

In the Windows desktop client, you browse through your files using its visually stunning interface. Although pretty, visual browsing isn't always the most efficient way to locate a particular file, so quanp's software also lets you search by keyword, tag, date, and more. The client even includes a basic reader for Microsoft Office files so you can see the content without having to launch the office software.

For Mac Users

Non-Windows users can use the online site to browse through files, but there's nothing all that exciting about this part of the service. It doesn't even offer an web version of the 3D interface. However, you can view files and their metadata, share them with others, plus upload or download files using buttons provided on the site.

Sexy, But Useful?

For the most part, a lot of what makes quanp fun to use is its visual eye candy. However, for users of the free Windows Live service, there may be some hesitation in switching. Although lacking a drag-and-drop widget of its own, Windows Live users can upload both photos and videos to online services using Photo Gallery software - and not just to the online service provided by Windows Live, but to flickr, Facebook, and YouTube as well (the last two via plugins). They can also tag files, identify faces, edit photos, and browse through files - just not in glorious 3D.

Of course there are plenty of other online storage services out there, but Windows Live is the most apt comparison since it, like quanp, is a combination of desktop software and an online component - a "software + services" arrangement. Most other online storage services either don't offer desktop tools at all or don't offer tools that also function as a way to elegantly browse and edit your files.

To determine if quanp is the better choice for you, think about whether you need to upload more than just photos or videos - if so, then quanp will work (although visual search of docs isn't quite as fun). Also of note, quanp offers 10 GB to Windows Live's 25 GB. However, the company plans to offer graded pricing in the future for additional storage, but no official decision has yet been made on exactly what that will be.

Of course, for some early adopters, "sexy" beats "practical" any day. If that describes you, then you should sign up for the quanp beta here. (But sorry world - the beta is U.S.-only!)

In this month's edition of Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the "data deluge" and offers a guide on how to manage and preserve your digital information.

"Loss, damage, and unavailability of important digital business, historical, and official documents regularly make the news further highlighting our dependence on electronic information," writes Berman.

Storage: How Much is Enough?

According to a 2008 IDC white paper, 2007 marked the "crossover" year, when there was more digital data created than data storage to host it. The IDC report also projected that by 2011 the amount of digital data created will be more than twice the amount of available storage.

Bottom line? We don't produce storage capacity at the same rate we produce digital information.

Who is responsible for Data Preservation?

Increasingly, policies and regulations are being set to regulate large data sets and digital information within large organizations across the world; Sarbanes-Oxley promotes responsible management of digital financial records, HIPAA looks after digital medical records (US), and the Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library (UK), as well as the National Library of Australia (AU) are among some of the organizations that support the preservation of digital information across the globe.

While most people agree that certain digital information is preservation worthy or of historical value to society, what about the digital pictures you took on your last holiday? Who is in charge of preserving them so that the next generation can access them?

In a nutshell, you are. While the Communications article ends with Berman's top ten recommendations for data preservation, here are three things you can do right now:

1. Make a plan: Determine who is going to be in charge of your digital data once you are no longer capable of looking after it.
2. Make multiple copies: When it comes to valuable data, store it in different formats at different locations
3. Migrate to new technologies: Don't wait for storage media to become obsolete, migrate to new technologies and formats as they become available.

Finally, with some cloud services offering free data storage, it's worth considering moving some of your data online. Take a look at our write up on online storage services for ideas on where to start.

Image credit: Data Storage Old and New - Thanks IanS

Your Music on Lala

You do not have to upload your complete music collection to Lala to be able to play it online. Instead, you download a small desktop client that goes out and looks for music on your computer that Lala already knows, which it then simply puts into your playlist. If Lala doesn't know the song, or if the song hasn't been licensed by Lala, the desktop client will upload it to the service.

Once your music has been uploaded, you will be greeted with a standard music player interface, where you can drag and drop songs into playlists, search your collection (which is very fast and easy), shuffle through your songs, and pretty much do anything you expect to be able to do with a desktop jukebox as well.

The only major restriction of the online music player is that it only displays 50 songs per page. The quick and easy search function and the iTunes like browser at the top of the page make up for this is some ways, but if you are used to just browsing through your collection, Lala will take some getting used to.

Music Store

The music store itself is interesting in its own right, though it is also derivative of its competitors. However, it comes with a number of interesting social features and, unlike in iTunes, you get one full play of every song before you are restricted to a 30 second sample. You can also buy the rights to play the song over the web for 10 cents.

Competition

There are, of course, already a fair number of stores that sell DRM-free MP3s, including Amazon and Rhapsody, while services like Imeem already allow you to play songs in full on the net with fewer restrictions than Lala.

Lala has also announced that it will release an iPhone application in the near future. With that, it will also take on Pandora and services like Simplify Media.

Lala's real advantage over its online competitors is that it is a one-stop shop that already holds all your music. The pricing model is interesting and Lala will surely get a lot of 10 cent impulse buys, but the real power behind Lala is in its ability to bring all your music together in one place on the net, just like iTunes did for the desktop.

Box.net has been around for quite a while, but is still one of our favorite places to store documents online. Thanks to its integration with numerous online services, including Gmail, Zoho, picnick, and Scribd, box.net can not only store all your documents, but can also function as the hub of your virtual office.

One other nice feature of box.net is that you can share your files and folders with 'collaborators,' which makes it a good service to exchange files within a small business or among friends.

The storage limit for the free accounts is 1GB, which is plenty if you mostly exchange text documents or spreadsheets. Paid accounts start at $7.95 a month and include more advanced features, including 5GB of storage, a versioning system, mobile access, and 24/7 phone support.

Live Mesh

The online storage component of Live Mesh is only one part of Micorsoft's latest venture into cloud computing, but it is also one of its most compelling features at this point. Live Mesh gives you 5GB of online storage and an online desktop that looks a lot like Windows Vista. You can upload any type of file to Live Mesh, but you cannot edit any of your files through the online desktop. In the future, though, we expect Microsoft to start adding more of these features.

One of the main reasons we like Mesh is because it constantly watches for changes in the folders you are synchronizing to it and updates them automatically. In addition, you can share folders with friends, allowing you to collaborate on projects.

Live Mesh works on both Windows PCs and Macs.

DropBox

Few online storage services integrate with your desktop as well as DropBox, which only recently opened up to the public after an extensive beta test. While you do have to install a small program on your machine to run DropBox, it is well worth it. Besides setting up a folder on your machine, which automatically syncs with DropBox, you can also set DropBox up to then sync that folder with other machines, similar to Live Mesh. DropBox lets you upload any type of file, as long as it is smaller than 350MB. DropBox uses Amazon's S3 service as its storage solution and provides its users with 2GB of free storage. For $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, you can buy 50GB of storage.

One of our favorite features of DropBox is that it preserves every revision of every file. You can also easily share folders with your friends or colleagues.

DropBox supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Oosah

Oosah's main selling point is simple: you get a whopping 1 terabyte of storage for media files. One restriction of Oosah is that you can't use it for text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, which seems a bit weird, given that those types of files are generally small.

One interesting aspect of Oosah is that it accepts RAW image files from most camera manufacturers, though it automatically converts them into JPGs. You can also connect to your Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube accounts and view your images and videos from those services in one central place. Oosah also gives you Media RSS feeds and even a podcast feed for your audio files.

While we love Oosah for its general ease of use, the one aspect we really did not enjoy was the fact that uploading files seems to be unnecessarily hard. Oosah does not provide any desktop clients and while you can use the web based uploader to select multiple files, uploading multiple directories at a time is not an option.

JungleDisk

JungleDisk is the only service in this list that is not available for free - and technically, it is not even an online storage service. Instead, it provides a frontend to Amazon's S3 storage service. JungleDisk costs $20 and after that, you pay Amazon for the storage and transfer of your files. JungleDisk also lets you map your Amazon S3 storage space as a network drive on your computer, so that you can just drag and drop files back and forth between your online storage and your local desktop.

JungleDisk is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Other Services

Online storage is a competitive market. The best services integrate fully with your desktop and allow you to effortlessly upload and download files. They also provide you with an online desktop to access files from any computers and are stable and dependable. A service that does not fulfill these basic requirements is going to have a hard time convincing users to use and trust it.

There are, of course, a large number of other online storage services that we did not include in this list. BOXSTr, for example, is a great application, but it constantly bothers you with ads and attempts to sell you their premium service. AOL's Xdrive is a great service, too, but we have heard too many rumors that AOL is trying to sell the service or that they will simply close it to be able to recommend it anymore.

The one company that is suspiciously missing from this list is Google. While you can upload your documents to Google Docs, the company that has made cloud computing a household name does not have a dedicated file storage service. While rumors about the existence of a 'GDrive' have regularly appeared in the tech blogosphere over the last few year, users still have to rely on hacks like the GMail Drive shell extension to store their files on Google's servers.

What Did We Miss?

Do you have a favorite service that we did not list? Let us know in the comments.

Logo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot.

While Wuala will happily sell you additional storage space (from $25 a year for 10GB to $1000 for 1TB), you can also trade your own local disk space for cloud storage space. If you share 5GB of space on your local drive, you will get an additional 5GB of online storage. Given how cheap hard disks have become, this seems like a fair trade-off. Users who share their local hard disk space can also turn off advertising on Wuala.

Wuala's client basically looks like a local folder and you can decide if you want to share any of your files stored on Wuala with either your friends or a group of users.

Encryption: The Good and the Bad

Even with the strong encryption Wuala uses, though, the fact that some information is going to be stored on machines outside of even Wuala's control is not going to sit well with a lot of people. While most private users can probably live with these risks (which are inherent in any cloud storage solution), businesses will probably stay very far away from Wuala.

There is also the question of how people will use Wuala - after all, the service provides almost unlimited and strongly encrypted storage. As Wuala has little control over what is shared on the network, Wuala might turn out to be a haven for rather unsavory activities. But then, the same can probably be said for most other cloud storage services as well.

Where's the Money?

The cloud storage market is highly competitive, but so far, no clear front-runner has emerged. Wuala's competitors include Box.net, Dropbox, Mozy, as well as Apple's Mobile Me and Microsoft's various online storage services, including SkyDrive and Mesh. There are also various software solutions to make backing up to Amazon's S3 more consumer friendly. All of these have different business models and feature sets, but Wuala's simplicity and P2P sharing approach will make it very competitive.

The new Adobe Photoshop Express Uploader lets you browse for photos to add to the uploader tool. As you add photos, you can choose to add them to one of your existing albums in Photoshop Express or you have the option to create a new one. In order to use the uploader, you'll need to sign in with your Adobe ID. (Since their launch of the Adobe online office suite available through Acrobat.com, all their apps now recognize a commonly-shared set of credentials: your Adobe ID.)

Other new features now available in Photoshop Express include:

• The ability to get prints of digital photos from Shutterfly
• The ability to add music to slideshows (pick a track from the Settings panel)
• A new resizing tool that lets you pick a preset image size for mobile, web, profile, or email - resize with one click or choose custom to set your own width and height
• Tagging photos is now possible
• The ability to download photos from anyone's public album or straight from a slideshow

One Small Problem: It Doesn't Work

Unfortunately, upon testing the new AIR app, I ran into a problem - it simply did not work. As I attempted to upload some small JPG images, I would receive an error message reading that the files were "unsupported." According to the message, the JPGs needed to be less than 10 MB in size and smaller than 4000x4000. Well, they were. I tried multiple files with the same results, so clearly there is something wrong there. Photoshop Express also only supports JPG photos so I could not attempt to upload any PNGs.

For the casual photographer, it's difficult to see how Photoshop Express can really compete here - especially now that Flickr provides basic photo editing tools, too, courtesy of Picnik. The niche they've carved out for Photoshop Express is very small: either you're deeply embedded with the Adobe line of products or you need better tools than Picnik and don't want to pay for either Photoshop Elements or Photoshop itself. That isn't a whole lot of people just now.

Adobe would be better off figuring out how to integrate the program into their suite of online office products. Imagine the value in being able to insert photos into Buzzword from Photoshop Express, and, after editing, having Buzzword automatically update itself with the revised photo. Now that would be something! Instead, we have an isolated app and a broken AIR uploader. We know Adobe can do better than this, so we're still optimistic that they will do so soon.

Yesterday, PutPlace's service launched into public beta. With this launch, Windows users (for now - Mac is coming later) can create an account and set up the folders they want backed up on their home computers' using the PutPlace desktop software. The software is not restricted to a certain number of machines, either. It can be - and should be - installed on all the PCs in the home. That's because PutPlace is designed for tracking the various versions of digital files as they move around your personal home network as well as when they make it to various online storage service, like flickr.

PutPlace knows that users with several computers in the home often end up with multiple copies of the same file and it can hard to determine which one is the newest. To determine the file versions, PutPlace digitally fingerprints each file with a hash so that it can then track it wherever it goes - whether to your laptop or online.

Adding "Web Places"

After setting up your folders to be backed up on your home computers, you can then add "web places" to your account. At the time of launch, this is a very short list - only flickr is included, but supposedly, in the future, the service will include other sites as well.

However, despite this lack of supported web services at the moment, one of PutPlace's better features is its ability to monitor specified folders on your computer and auto-publish them to sharing services. With this option turned on, you can have PutPlace setup to push all your pictures to flickr without having to manually use flickr's uploader tool. For those that publish a lot of pictures to flickr, this feature could be a huge timesaver.

The Desktop Software

Setting up the desktop software is easy enough to do and there's even an online Quick Start Guide with screenshots to walk you through the process. There are other online guides and a FAQ available from the service's help page. Configuring folders to auto-publish must be done from the web interface to PutPlace, not the desktop software, which honestly took me a couple of minutes to realize after exploring all the options in the desktop software's menus.

The Public Beta

While PutPlace is in beta, the software is free*. (*Up to 2 GB). After the beta period is over, pricing will be determined, but it will be on an pay-for-what-you-use basis.

In this early state, some have compared PutPlace to syncplicity without the sync and collaboration. That's somewhat true except for PutPlace's emphasis on tracking files and auto-publishing them to web services. Of course, with only one source so far (flickr), that option may only hold limited appeal at the moment. If in the future, PutPlace added more services (and there really are so many today - just think of all the ones you can add to FriendFeed!), then it could become more useful.

There's also the possibility that PutPlace may have to, one day, compete with Windows Live Mesh. Currently only in a "technical preview" itself, this service is really a platform built with standard protocols like HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON . While at the moment, Mesh only does sync, storage, web access to files, and remote access to meshed machines, there's no reason why, further down the line, it could not also compete with the type of service that PutPlace offers.

However, all that being said, PutPlace may still be worth a look. Since it is providing free online backup and storage, frugal folks like myself will probably utilize PutPlace's free service for a while to back up some files in addition to all those we already have spread out across the web on other free storage services. Also, for photographers especially, the tool which auto-syncs files to flickr could make the service beneficial. (That is...if they're running Windows. )

It doesn't appear as if the sale happened - an update on DivShare's blog in January claimed that it was "turning down some big buyout offers".

While it's good that DivShare has been open about the security breach and they appear to have taken swift measures in fixing it, unfortunately it raises more concerns about startups which offer online storage. When it comes to any personal data online, as a user you want to be absolutely certain that it is both secure and going to be available in future - no matter what.

Would you trust your data with a company that has this to say after it's database has been compromised: "...we recommend that you change your account password and the passwords on any private folders as a security precaution." Yikes!

Collaborators can be given either "Viewer" or "Editor" rights the folder, a setting you select before sending the invite. After the invitation is sent, those users will then see the same folder appear in their accounts. Every time a new file is added to the folder, all subscribed users are alerted either via email or in the "Updates" section of their Box.net homepage.

Along with collaboration, Box.net is also releasing Version History for any file on Box for users with a premium account. With Version History, any file that you or the collaborators edit will now have a complete record of versions, which is great for un-doing changes, recovering deleted content, and rolling back to previous versions.

The killer feature of the collaboration offering is that it's fully compatibility with Box.net's OpenBox services. With this functionality, collaborators can choose to edit documents online, like they can with Google Docs, but users can choose to use either Zoho or thinkfree to do so. Where Box.net trumps Google Docs is in the fact that Box.net collaborators can also edit photos online with Picnik or Snipshot. Once the edits are finished, Box.net makes it easy to then publish files online to any of the OpenBox services. The full list of these partnered web services includes: Autodesk Freewheel, blog posting (to Wordpress, LiveJournal, or Blogger), Echosign, eFax, facebook, Myxer, picnik, Scribd, Snipshot, thinkfree, twitter, Zazzle, and Zoho.

Although the collaboration feature makes Box.net a worthy adversary in the realm of online document sharing and editing, the Google Docs solution is still a more robust offering overall as it also includes business-oriented features like email, calendaring, IM, web page creation, and administration features.

The Box.net collaboration beta is available now to all members and everyone can participate in as many folders as they are invited to. However, free account holders can only create up to three collaboration folders.

ReadWriteWeb was given exclusive early access to the beta of SugarSync. As well as the first look, we have 1,500 beta invites for our readers (details at the end of this post).

SugarSync was built on a platform called Sharpcast Universal Synchronization Platform, which Sharpcast plans to make available to mobile phone operators and others. Sharpcast claims that SugarSync is "the only comprehensive synchronization service that offers real-time sync and backup of your data across all of your computers, the web and your phone." The SugarSync beta is, we're told, only a subset of what the platform will eventually do.

Sharpcast first made its name in 2006-07 as a sync manager for photos. That was always meant to be a proof of concept of the more extensive file sync functionality. With SugarSync, you download a desktop app to your computer(s), but you can also access it online at sugarsync.com and on your mobile at m.sugarsync.com.

Mobile access in general has been beefed up, with special mobile applications for different media types. In the beta, there is a downloadable gallery application for photos, enabling you to (for example) view and share your Picasa photos from your phone, or wirelessly sync camera phone photos back to your Vista gallery. Currently there are mobile apps available at m.sugarsync.com for Blackberry and Windows Smartphones; with J2ME, Symbian and Brew clients in development. Mobile apps for music and video syncing/streaming are coming soon too.

The private beta SugarSync is Windows-only at this point, but the Mac version is coming soon and will certainly be there on public launch. Linux will also eventually be supported.

How SugarSync Works

The real beauty of SugarSync is that it's real-time - so when you update something on the cloud, it is automatically synced to your computer (and vice versa). The way this works is that SugarSync monitors files on your computer and keeps a synchronized copy of them on their secure central server. For the Web and mobile access, you basically receive a personal website where you can access your data - the company says that this is securely backed up in two carrier grade data centers.

Users get 1 GB of data free and there will be premium options available for more data. However note that during the beta period, you can get up to 11 GB of storage for free.

Sharpcast CTO Ben Strong, the architect of the Sharpcast Universal Sync platform which SugarSync is built on, told ReadWriteWeb that SugarSync aims to be "a system that combines the best attributes of the online vault and remote access solutions." By online vault, he means online storage solutions such as Windows Live Drive; and by remote access solutions he means products like GoToMyPC and Soonr.

Strong told us:

"We want access through any web browser and automatic backup plus great integration with our desktop applications and access to the most recent version of the files on our computers. And the pieces must be fully integrated, so that changes made in the vault are fully reflected on all our computers and devices. And to top it off, we need to be able to easily publish media from our vault to social networks and content sites like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube."

It's taken about 4 years for Sharpcast to come up with this sync platform and the product now known as SugarSync. Also, as noted above, some of the features mentioned (such as social network syncing) are not yet available in the beta. So some of this theory won't be seen in the wild for months, but it is a big problem that Sharpcast is tackling.

As of now, Strong said that SugarSync supports "a broad array of consumer data types, including both files (e.g., documents and media), and database-resident objects (e.g., contacts, calendars, and playlists), with the ability to easily add new data types without modifying the core sync engine."

Platform Access to Third Party Developers

A question always asked in this day and age is: will third party developers have access to the platform? For SugarSync, the answer is yes according to Sharpcast Ben Strong:

"We have a set of APIs that allow developers to either access and modify data that has been created by other applications and services, or to create and sync their own custom file and object types. They work with a simple set of data access primitives, while we take care of hard parts of sync: conflict resolution, scalable and secure server-side storage, efficient change notification, access control, account management, billing, and all the features mentioned above. This dramatically reduces the level of effort required to build a new application that works seamlessly across multiple devices. Furthermore, we are committed to working with interested parties to standardize next-generation sync protocols and APIs."

A possible example of how the platform could be utilized by third party developers is Outlook talking to iCal, something which many people would like. So a third party developer could create a solution that syncs those two products together.

The APIs will probably be released later in 2008, but there is no firm date at this time.

Target Market

Sharpcast's target market for SugarSync is "prosumers" - a mix of home, SMB and enterprise users. In our interview, CEO Gibu Thomas told me that down the line they will tackle enterprise more - e.g. one option will be for enterprises to host the central and web servers in-house.

Our Take

It's obvious that Sharpcast is aiming to become the leading platform for sync services, becoming a connecting cog in the world of data on desktops, mobile and Web. In a way, Sharpcast reminds me of Feedburner, in that it wants to become the leading platform for a new type of media service that only came into being in the Internet age. In Feedburner's case it was syndication (specifically RSS), which turned out to be a key part of today's Web - and led to Google acquiring Feedburner last year. In Sharpcast's case, sync services are also primed to become a key part of the Internet ecosystem. I'm not aware of any other comprehensive sync platform, just as when Feedburner started there were no other comprehensive RSS platforms.

The big Internet companies - particularly Microsoft, Google and Adobe - are all working on sync services of their own. But, if the technology lives up to its promise, Sharpcast is poised to become the leader in this space. So I wouldn't be surprised if Sharpcast becomes an acquisition target (if it isn't already) for those bigcos.

It must be said that it's taken a long time for Sharpcast to fulfil the promise that we saw in it in 2006. And it's still only private beta mode, so too early to tell for sure if this will be successful. The messaging could also be improved a little (the distinction between the platform and SugarSync isn't entirely clear right now). But still, the Feedburner analogy is looking pretty strong to me - I expect Sharpcast to become a familiar name to Web users before the year is out.

ReadWriteWeb Exclusive Private Beta Invites to SugarSync

We have 1,500 beta invites to the SugarSync to give away to RWW readers. Click here and enter the code: RWW (it will be auto-populated with the code). When you check out the service, be sure to come back to ReadWriteWeb and leave a comment about your experiences.