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Skydrive from Microsoft Boosts Storage to 25 Gig

I read about this around the first of the month but never finished the article.  Procrastination for the win.  (I sure am pulling a lot of information off of Web Worker Daily of late.  I seem to have a lot of the same interests as one of the authors over there, namely Scott Blitstein.

He mentioned that Windows Live Sky Drive was upping it’s free storage limit to 25 gig.  This is better for online backups/etc, however I do not find the service as flexible or nearly as useful as DropBox.  You can read the post from Redmond here.

I use DropBox constantly.  I save files to it, it transparently uploads them, and all my other registered machines “ninja” sync anything changed.  AND it uses versioning.

However.  Sky Drive is expanding their feature set to compete with .mac or mobile me, or whatever Apple is calling it’s service now.  (Disclaimer:  I am neither a Microsoft nor an Apple fanboi, so save your drink the Koolaid comments for others.)  Both companies have some interesting products, however, I tend to end up with the MS versions of almost everything.

Picture sharing from Sky Drive just doesn’t impact me much.

Bookmark sync for IE, however, would be nice.  I currently use Firefox and it’s Foxmarks Extension to manage my bookmarks, and one of the things that I dislike about IE 8 has been lack of interesting plugin support.

Well, if you go to the Sky Drive Team Blog, you can read about the launch.  Yeah, I missed it.  Probably due to my real life being embroiled in drama.  Features in a nutshell?

• 25 GB of free online storage
• Available in 6 more regions and 13 more languages
• Download entire folders as Zip files (limited release)
• Gorgeous online slide show for your photos
• And much, much more!

Well, most of that isn’t going to impact me, much.  I think Flickr is a better photo sharing medium, but I’ll try it out.  (Not to plug my favorite product, but DropBox offers this too.) 

Oh yeah, you can find Sky Drive here.  Now in order to sync favorites you have to have the Live toolbar installed.  Not so wonderful.  However, I find that MS is using a good business tactic to compete with Apple’s mobile me service, however, Apple has been doing this for over 4 years or so.  Hopefully Redmond will do something more than mimic the old .mac feature set.

At this point it does seem to work ok, I’m going to upload some photos when i get the chance and try that out.  It seems that the Windows Live suite of add on programs should be integrating pretty tightly with this, so I guess I’ll go ahead and down load them and check out if they work or if they are too dumbed down.  However, I’m totally in love with Windows Live Writer, it is an another excellent product like OneNote or InkSeine.  (Tablet based I am, remember?)  If you have a tablet and like ink, I suggest you try it out, it complements OneNote nicely.