Today I ran across a simple, elegant free site that’s a great alternative to a complicated ftp site. If you need to share files that are too big to e-mail but less than 100 mb, Senduit is an excellent choice.
Almost all social software utilities like Facebook and YouTube are free, because as Chris Anderson says, there’s a huge psychological difference between $0.00 and $0.01. The price of admission for these sites is usually creating a username and password. Not a huge barrier, and there are benefits that accompany the accounts, but it still creates some hassle in getting started with a service.
Senduit is as effortless a file sharing utility as I can imagine. Check that: I think it’s as effortless as anyone could imagine. Here’s the user interface:
You just choose the file, pick how long you want it to be available, and hit the upload button:
After a few minutes, depending on your file size, you get a screen that looks something like this:
Then, if you send that URL to someone by e-mail, or insert it in a blog post as a clickable link like this:
http://senduit.com/921e87
They can click the link and the download starts automatically.
Note: This link should be working until about June 4, 2008. It’s video I took of some friends and former patients who were back in Rochester to visit last week. You can read their updates here. If you’re reading this post after that date, give Senduit a try with your own file.
At first I wondered how this could possibly be a money-making enterprise, especially given the Senduit privacy policy, which says:
File Privacy
The name, type, contents, and origin of your file are not saved, reviewed, or analyzed. The only monitoring that takes place are our automated tallies of file uploads and our automated cleaning of expired files.
Transfer and Storage Security
Although we take appropriate measures to ensure the privacy of our user’s data, it’s impossible for us to guarantee 100% security. For this reason, we suggest you do not use our service to share sensitive data. Once a file has been uploaded, it is your responsibility to share your file’s address in a secure manner.
File Expiration
All uploaded files are designated to expire at the point in time selected (anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 week). After a file has expired, it becomes inaccessible to the public and is permanently removed from our systems.
But then, when I downloaded my own file, I saw how they work in the advertising. It looks like this:
Unlike the annoying pop-up ads you see on newspaper web sites, this isn’t one you’d click to skip. And when you click the ad it opens in a new window, leaving your download happening in the background.
This seems like a great, user-friendly service, and the only real costs should be bandwidth. Files never stay on their servers for more than a week, so storage costs should be negligible. Like they say, you wouldn’t want to place highly sensitive files on their servers, but it appears that the odds of someone randomly finding your URL are something like 1 in 2,176,782,336.
Give Senduit a try and let me know what you think about it.
