Excite Teaches Surfers to Share

Deal to let users easily share personal files may signal Next Big Thing for portals.

Jim Evans, The Industry Standard

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That's why there are Web-based applications like free e-mail, calendars, and address books on Yahoo, Excite, and others. The companies reason that these applications will increase the number of users on the sites and keep them there longer. Until now, however, portals have shied away from hosting users' files on the Net. Why? The fear that storage would eat up valuable bandwidth.

But last week Excite signed a deal with Seattle-based Punch Networks to get the ability to publish and share personal files, such as text documents, spreadsheets, and graphics, via the Web. To many, it's a preview of the next big thing on the portals, because the service is both "sticky" (inviting people to stay on sites for long periods) and "viral" (likely to be passed on by word of mouse).

"Excite realizes that file sharing is good from a stickiness standpoint and a viral standpoint," says Dan Campi, chief executive officer of Punch Networks. "They have a chance to pull in two or three other users for each user who has a file online."

Learning to Share

The technology works like this: At Excite's site, a person uploads a file from their hard drive to an account on the portal. When it's posted, others can download the file and make changes on their desktops. They can then upload their changes directly to the original on the Web, bypassing the bandwidth-heavy task of uploading the whole file again. The file is then marked with a description of who changed what and when.

Excite chose to partner with Punch because Punch users need to upload changes only, not entire files. "The updating feature of the technology was the most attractive feature to us," says David Williams, director of content at Excite.

Do You Need A Suite?

The basic technology isn't new. Visto, for one, allows people to do many of the same things, but it provides its file sharing technology in a suite of applications that includes free e-mail and calendar services. To Visto, file sharing isn't important without the integrated applications.

"The larger portals are trying to fill out their feature sets," says Steven Cox, vice president of marketing at Visto. "But our vision is that integration is the key, and that file sharing needs to be in combination with other things."

Visto has had talks with the major portals about offering some, if not all, of its services to their users. In fact, Theglobe.com uses the company's calendar and address book. But so far none of the major players have expressed much interest in Visto's vision.

Still, collaborative Web-based applications are clearly gaining momentum. Last week ActiveTouch unveiled WebEx Offices, which allows real-time sharing of presentations, applications, documents, and browsers within a digital-office context.

Some venture capitalists have spotted the trend, but suspect that file sharing services may make more sense as technology than as independent companies. "We've seen a bunch of people who are talking about file sharing right now," says Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. "We're deciding whether it's a stand-alone business or not."

What Do Users Want to Share?

While Yahoo has explored file sharing and storing, it hasn't committed itself to a technology. The issue isn't bandwidth. Yahoo users simply haven't been clamoring for file sharing, says Ellen Siminoff, Yahoo's vice president of business development and strategic planning. "It's an area we're exploring because it targets business users," she says. "But I don't know that there is a huge use for file sharing yet."

There's also the privacy issue. Theoretically, the main market for this kind of technology is business travelers, who by nature have sensitive company documents on their hard drives. One chief executive officer of a San Francisco software company says he wouldn't be quick to adopt file sharing on the Net. He doesn't want prying eyes on his files.

Punch Networks' Campi says the association with Excite should increase the comfort factor. "Once you know you're dealing with a brand name like Excite, your trust level goes up," he says.

Excite is banking on the trust issue resolving itself when enough people begin using the technology--just like it did for e-commerce. If the recent portal chorus of "anything you can do, I can do better" continues, and if Excite finds that people are spending more time online using file sharing, other portals may not be far behind.

For more in-depth coverage of the Internet Economy, visit The Industry Standard.

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