Instant File Sharing

Fed up with uploading files, like photos, you want to share. Maybe those services that allow you to send 500 Mb emails are simply not big enough for you. Welcome Izimi. You can use Izimi to share files by sending simple URLs to friends, you can use them as links in websites, you can embed images and some videos into other web properties (such as your blogger account), all without having to take any time to upload.

The main difference between Izimi and other similar file transfer and storage services is that when you publish or share using Izimi you don’t need to upload your photos or other files anywhere. So, it is literally instantaneous, they are available to anyone with a web browser from a simple URL instantly.

I asked izimi’s VP of Products, David Ingram, about the system. “Izimi plays to the always-on broadband generation, and people with home media servers,” he told me. “Furthermore, whilst flickr only lets you share photos and video, Izimi lets you share any file, any size, any type, no restrictions,” Ingram enthuses.

But, doesn’t this system rely on a user’s system, whether their media server or their computer being online 24/7?

“We have plans for providing resilient and offline serving (using P2P techniques) but that is for the future,” Ingram revealed, “I cannot be too specific, but imagine the way that torrent distributes fragments of files among other users. The Izimi client would manage distribution of fragments across other client nodes (possibly some way to nominate trusted nodes, people in my ‘circle’, etc). Izimi uses things which we call access points today to collect and stream content, and these would be modded to ‘gather’ the fragments from multiple nodes, and stream them reconstructed to the browser. Initial investigations confirm the
possibility, but its not built yet. Benefits would be that your content could be available even when your system is offline, it will also improve speed performance.” These features will hopefully be implemented later in 2007.

And, what if you are on a slow internet connection, a dial-up network modem, perhaps, will those users be accommodated too? Unfortunately not, Ingram has a rather blunt answer: “It just wouldn’t work on DUN, no chance,” he told me.

So, if you want instant sharing of all file types, Izimi could be your answer, but you might want to upgrade to broadband first.