Box.net, your online Documents folder

Whether it's Documents, My Documents, or whatever, Box.net can store it. While I'm a little surprised the box industry didn't grab the domain first, I'm more surprised by the functionality within Box.net's simple interface. Box is another web-based storage solution, a "place for your stuff" online. What makes Box.net different than some other online storage solutions? Choices and ease-of-use.

You can save from Mac, Windows, even Linux. No biggie, as most others do this via the standard web app. Box includes a Java applet as an option. The applet allows you to simply drag-n-drop your files, which worked flawlessly on my machines. If you want to share your documents, that's easily accomplished with a few clicks, but there are options here as well. How about RSS feeds? They'll let you automagically update files to subscribers when you update them. That's a cool thing... Box has a mobile site as well, operational with "Blackberries, Palm Treos, Sidekicks, PocketPCs, and more." If anyone tries this with a Palm LifeDrive, I'd love to know if you can move files with it. More after the jump.


As for the simplicity, most operations are either two-click onscreen affairs or a small dialog box. You can, for instance, add tags and descriptions to your data via dialog box. I don't see a way to aggregate your data on a regular basis, so that'd be nice. The simple search feature works well, although it is limited by being unable to search inside docs (like OS X's searching inside PDF's).


There's a button for zipping files as well, which I assume you'd want to do if you got low on storage. A small meter at the bottom of most screens indicates your data usage, and I had no problem throwing MP3's and videos onto it. Still under 10% at this point.

Some other features (why do I find myself wishing they had a bulleted list? am I that brainwashed by PowerPoint?) include email file uploads, email backups (via forwarding), and workgroups (sub-accounts) for ad-hoc private groups.

I couldn't get the online photos to work, but I was probably doing something wrong. The interface is easy, but that's not to say it couldn't use some work. In fact, if you blended this with some Ajaxian desktop metaphor UI, you'd have a pretty sweet tool. But I digress. Another malfunctioning part was ftp access, though it's only disabled for new users. They say to check back in a couple of weeks...

All this will set you back $2.99 per month for one gig of storage. That's the monthly option. Remember, I said choices. There's a student account for $15 a year with 500 MB of storage, while the yearly normal account is $24.99 for 1 GB. Sadly, there is no free trial. But if there were, I'm sure this would all be in beta...

Tags: commercial