The evolution of file sharing
We all have files that we want to share with our friends – photos, videos, movies and documents. Back in the early days of computing, if you had something to share, you had to physically copy the file to a floppy drive, carry it over to your friend’s computer and then copy it over to his hard drive. This meant you had to physically transfer the files. By the way, today’s modern equivalent of the floppy is the USB stick.
With the advent of email, sharing became a lot easier – all you had to do was attach the file to an email and hit send. The problem with email was that you could not send big files such as high resolution photos, or videos or large PowerPoint presentations. The solution people use today is to copy it over to a public cloud service such as Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive.
The ‘push’ approach
Up until now, your go-to-solution of sharing files has been the same old industry standard ‘push’ approach. What I mean is that you ‘pushed’ your content by email or you ‘pushed’ it to a USB device or you ‘pushed’ it to a public cloud service.
But what about when the files are really large, like sharing a movie – or what about highly sensitive information that you are not comfortable putting in the cloud – or what if you have lots to share – you will run out public storage space pretty quickly and adding more can cost a pretty penny.
The problem is that whenever you ‘push’ something that you want to share – you face file size limitations, storage capacity limitations and slow upload speeds. Plus there are security issues and cost issues.
Why not ‘pull’ files from their original locations
The next wave in file sharing flips the paradigm on its head. Instead of ‘pushing’ a file to a USB or to the public cloud, why not keep the files and their original locations and access or ‘pull’ them out at your convenience. Those files might be on your PC, your laptop, your tablet or smartphone. The files might be on a smart router or a network attached storage device. Or the files might be in Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive. It shouldn’t matter.
When you share files from their current locations, you don’t have problems with file size limits, or storage capacity limitations, or uploads or compression degradation. Security is handled by an encrypted transfer directly from where they are stored to you without going through a middleman.
There is a new app for file sharing that doesn’t use the traditional ‘push’ approach – it is called Qnext. It has just been introduced as a free app for Facebook. It runs within Facebook to allow you to share photos, videos and files with your Facebook friends. Since nothing you share is uploaded to Facebook, the files do not become Facebook property – they belong to you. Also, this app becomes a gateway to your files no matter where they are stored – on your computer, tablet, phone, NAS drive or smart router or Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box or Ubuntu account.
To get Qnext for Facebook free, go to https://apps.facebook.com/qnextshare/.