Windows Live Folders debut

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Looks like Microsoft has opened up its Windows Live Folders offering here. Nothing earth-shaking, but it has a nice clean user interface and offers 500MB of free storage. You can store documents, music etc. in various folders, send links to friends, make it public, private or shared only to certain people. You can also control read or contribute settings on a folder for others. Standard HTTPInputFile control uploads, no fancy ActiveX or other junk to bomb-out your browser.

Here is an example link to a file I have in one of my "public" folders:

http://cid-683c01ce35fb357d.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/pondpic.jpg

BTW -- they have an IFRAME snippet that "embeds" a Live Drive (yep - they've changed the name already) item in your page. You want to be very careful about using these - I had one in this post and then every time I'd load this UnBlog in my browser, the little booger would take control and redirect everybody to the Live Drive page. DOH!

I've been using Yahoo Briefcase for a number of years, but this looks like a good replacement and is more flexible. Yahoo is still in the dark ages with this stuff, they want you to pay for extra space and features, and the ability to share files. I don't mind looking at ads as long as they don't interfere with the features I need. So, folders people? Give me the option to automate transferring my "Stuff" from Yahoo's crappy Briefcase to Live Folders and I'll happily look at your ads instead of theirs...

BTW, they offer a "Help us improve" feedback thing. I've already offered a few suggestions:

1) Offer a Details View with datetime and filesize, just like in Windows Explorer Views.

2) Let me search for my uploaded files in the existing "folder" or in all folders. Doods! This ain't rocket science -- how 'bout it?

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous1:00 PM

    Hmmmm, don't know if this is a bad omen for them, but you get a nasty, ugly error page when clicking on the link - https://folders.live.com/home.aspx

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg1:54 PM

    Try it again. I changed the link to
    http://folders.live.com/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:51 PM

    Peter, still doesn't work. I can get to it here: http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=8295087940144&lang=en-US&mkt=en-US&FORM=CVRE
    but of course that won't get you to far.

    ReplyDelete
  4. peterbromberg8:05 PM

    Sorry, I've even tried this with Firefox, and it works just fine. Are you behind some sort of corporate firewall doing this, or what?

    ReplyDelete

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