Can anyone guess what the significance of this photo is:

As a multi-purpose storage company, we can never know how our service will be used by a specific user. Thus, the best way to organize and present files all users are through folders that everyone is familiar with. This often causes a problem, however, when people try and use us for photo sharing, not necessarily because you don’t keep your photos in folders, but because most photo sharing sites on the internet have tailored their design and file-organization specifically for photos. Since we cannot determine whether you are a photo sharing user vs. a document sharing user from the start (or you could be both), we have implemented some very simple yet interesting automated decisions. If you share a folder that has more than 60% photos in it, we assume that this is a photo gallery. When it is shared with the public, we will display thumbnails of your photos rather than small icons in a list format (the previous method). If you share a folder that has SUB-folders, we will use the same standards to display an album image to represent sub folders that are comprised of more than 60% photos, and any other files or folders will appear in list view under the albums. Crazy, huh?

If you need an example, here is a folder I have setup with 2 albums beneath it: http://www.box.net/public/rn9d02da8a

Also, if you didn’t notice, you can now add a personalized greeting and photo that is displayed on your public folder pages. Way more coming soon!

One of the most difficult issues with having an Ajax-based site is the need for some user behavior to change. Well, we finally conquered the beast, and starting tomorrow, anytime you are browsing through your account, you can safely hit your back and forward buttons and they will return expected results (safari coming soon).

During a routine google search for box.net mentions and links, I ran into a troubling post on an “elance” type website. I’ll let the title speak for itself:

Project: Box.net Clone

Well, this is fun. It’s always amazing to think about people’s varying perceptions of the complexity and difficulty that goes into developing a technology company. Sure, at the core, anyone can make a site that uploads and downloads a file- heck, you could probably throw in sharing and and sub-users a week later. But this is not your company. The value you are providing is in the reliability, ease of use, support, and of course those few extra features that go above and beyond users’ expectations (eg, netvibes and goowy integrations). If this person, or anyone else, thinks that getting into online storage is as easy as creating a “clone” of Box.net, imagine this same provider as the gateway to your critical files. Altogether, this introduces a whole new issue that should be touched on.

If you’re like me, you find yourself exploring a handful of new websites every day. Techcrunch and others provide us with no shortage of beta previews for malnourished RSS readers. Will most of these profiled websites still be around by the end of the year? Tough to tell, but my guess is no. Since the barriers to entry are often so minimal (capital, resources, etc) - then, on the converse, the barriers to exit can be similarly small. If you didn’t take five million from a VC, then what’s stopping you from closing the doors and going back to your day job? I’m not trying to instill fear in anyone- but I think it’s an interesting question - and one that should be asked. I know we get asked it daily. The difference is that Box.net has a clear understanding of what it wants to achieve and how it will get there. We don’t rely on contextual ads or complicated partnerships to stay around; we rely on our site and service being excellent and users wanting to pay for it. That’s all for now

Ohh, and by the way, some sweet photo gallery stuff is coming later today.

About 3 months ago I got in contact with Tariq and Florent of Netvibes. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Netvibes, they are a personalized startpage that allows you to manage your RSS feeds and some integrated apps in a very cool Ajax environment. If you’re keeping track, these are the guys that started the web 2.0 homepage craze. Within a few conversations, we realized that there was a compelling partnership to be made. The idea was so simple, but it really changed the way we thought about our business. This integration brings new meaning to our phrase, “access your files from anywhere.” With partnerships like Netvibes, users will have the freedom and convenience of making their files available in an environment they already feel comfortable with. There is a lot more to come in this area, and we’re very excited to have Netvibes onboard with us.

For now, I will let Netvibes take the reigns in explaining how this module works. Check out their blog for more details. Thanks Tariq, Florent, and the rest of the Netvibes team for making this happen!

It is very interesting to stop and think about which websites on the internet have excellent technology and which have perfect marketing. In many cases, a single company will not have both of these components. The reason for this is generally due to the skill-set or focus of the proprietors, lack of resources, or simply no need for the additional element. To this day, Box.net has always been considered a “marketing play” to people familiar with our technology, business model, and strategies. To offer some reference point, a service like Amazon’s S3 would be considered a technology play. A good friend of mine, Tim (are you reading this?), has always said that a company can only be one or the other: your product can only win because of its technology, or because of its marketing (pricing/features/design), but not both. This is a very interesting way of thinking about your business, and allows you to question where you stand from the very beginning. Because of this framing, we decided it would always be more important to budget heavily for things like PR, Marketing, Design, Customer service, etc. Due to our recent growth, however, we are coming upon a stage where it is important to focus on how our technology can become and remain excellent. I am referring to the less material aspects of our Box.net - nerdy things like fault tolerance and distributed storage. This is the side of our business you (as a user) never need to see. Of course their benefits will be visible in some capacity, whether it be our Sync software, partnerships, or mobile access. Without sounding too philosophical, a company like ours needs to innovate as well as communicate.

Here at BoxHQ, we’re very excited to have reinvented our image, and we hope to continue to surprise the internet with how cool online file storage can be. I am also happy to introduce the newest member of our team, Jeff, to our readers and users. Jeff will be helping to refocus our efforts on both the technology and marketing fronts. Feel free to shoot him a message at jeff@box.net.

Update: Seth Godin briefly explains that good technology gives you a shot at marketing. Thanks for the link, Caine!

It came to our attention today that Streamload has taken on “blog advertising.” For the most part their ads are now syndicated across the same networks we’re dealing with. In some respects, this would be the same as seeing an iTunes and Rhapsody advertisement on the same site. Of course both are very different; they provide different experiences/pricing and appeal to (sometimes) different users- but to the untrained eye, their products are very similar. In the online storage world, we’re all competing against each other on various fronts. In this specific case, Streamload may be a very appealing solution for media-heavy user wanting to backup or share their home movies, music collection, etc. On their site, you will not find any descriptions of work groups, RSS sharing (though I imagine it’s coming), or a mobile site - Why? Because again, they’re after a slightly different market. The interesting thing is that we’re not actually competing against Streamload. And we’re no longer competing against Xdrive, Omnidrive, Strongspace, or any other startup in this market. The game has changed dramatically, in an instant. We are now competing with Google and potentially Amazon (depending on who builds on top of them).

So I wonder, maybe rhetorically, is there any way we can have a uniform response to this upcoming challenge? I’m doubtful, but I figured it could be a fun question to ask. I love competition, that’s why this business got started in the first place- but we need to be sure we understand who the true “enemy” is. Until this question does get answered, though, Box will surely put up a fight for the online storage crown

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’re revamping our public sharing quite a bit. We are going to allow free users to share files publicly with anyone who has a Box.net account (the signup process is very easy/quick for a new user visiting your public page). Premium/pro users will continue to be able to share files with both Box.net users and the public. The main question is, is there anything that our public sharing is lacking? We already have a way to play your MP3 files and display your photos in a slideshow. Next up is document previews and video playback. But maybe we can even go further? Do you want to have a public profile page where you can add some quick details, links, or contact information? Do you want a “public main page” like box.net/pages/email@email.com that will display public files chosen by you? Do you want the ability to “subscribe” to a friend’s shared folder in your Box.net account?

Let us know! As long as it fits our model, and users want it, then we want to build it.

As of a few minutes ago, Amazon web services launched an online storage platform for developers (thanks for the tip, Nik). Interestingly, we had been contacted by Amazon in early December to take part in an early project, which I’m now realizing was this. I turned down that offer because we were already 4 months into our new site and it was not reasonable to redesign our framework to support such a relationship. It’s definitely interesting to finally know what they were putting together.

So, the main question is, are we now competing with Amazon? In short, no. S3 is aimed at developers who want to tap into cheap storage for their applications through an open API. You see, Box.net’s storage offering is very different than this. And I quote:

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set. The focus is on simplicity and robustness.

You see, Box.net’s goal is to let sites like NetVibes.com and Goowy.com give their users a place to store their documents, photos, and files. But more importantly, since we act as a neutral back-end (and front-end), the user can move between other applications which use our storage and still have access to those same files. That is very different from what Amazon is offering. Amazon is intending their storage to act, in effect, as a web host. If you’re looking for an easy way to offload large data from your site, this would definitely be the place to go (of course you will still need a server to get the data to them).

Now that we’ve established that Amazon and Box.net are not competing against one another, you may wonder why we don’t just use their storage. Beyond reliability issues, technical limitations of the API, and the troubles of outsourcing, lies the issue of bandwidth pricing. Amazon is charging $.20/gb for upstream and downstream transfer. Here is some simple math that I just posted on techcrunch regarding the costs of a free box.net user:

Files need to pass through our servers before they are stored or distributed back to the user. This would make our bandwidth costs double (for each direction). We would be paying for Amazon’s cost, and our own. So if you wanted to store and retrieve 1GB in a month, the net effect is .40 (Amazon’s BW) +.15 (Amazon’s storage) +our BW and server costs.

Now consider sharing, where this same user needs around 10GB transfer/mo for photos/clips/files, and we end up paying $2.20+.15+our BW and server costs.

If these were our costs for an average free account, we, or anyone who offered it, would be in business for no more than two months. Uncoupling storage from the application makes it impossible to have a practical business when you’re paying for the bandwidth. All in all, this is why neither Amazon nor a web services API developer will be competing with Box.net (or google).

Update#2: John has informed me that there may be around the double-bandwidth scenario. This may be possible in situations when the user needs to get straight to their file, however we do a lot of localized processing of the data before the user or the storage sees it.

Update: Michael Arrington and Rob Hof have their comments on this release.

By the way: Pending a company-wide decision, I think that “Sync without the think” will be the winner of our sync slogan contest.

As usual, Dylan and I have nothing better to do on a Saturday than dream up possible slogans for our upcoming Sync software. Here’s the prompt: We’re building a splash page that will act as a download/information site for the new application. We need a headline that grabs your attention right away. It needs to be less than 6 words. It should be catchy, but instill a sense of seriousness. Here are the not-so-horrible ones we came up with (we’ll spare you from the really bad ones):

We take the stink out of sync
Don’t think, Sync.
Sync is the new pink.
Sync. Nuff said.
If only everything was this easy

I’m sure there are better ideas out there, so post away. If your slogan is the chosen one, we’ll upgrade your account to “pro” status for a year. Wow.