The details on the 3rd public release of Skydrive are out. I consider Live’s online storage service extremely important due to the shape of things that are coming. Both from a user and a developer standpoint.
So let’s see what we’re getting.
Hits
- 25 GBs of storage space. Since no one was using the ginormous 5GBs that were previously available they though they could ramp it up anyway. That’s only good. In fact it’s crushing every single paid service I know of.
- Better photos. You can now download straight to the Live Gallery, or download a folder as a zipped file. Awesome !
- Photos can be seen in fantastic Flash or Silverlight slideshows. It also syncs with Live Photogallery’s tags for people etc. The thumbnails are huge blah blah blah. If this was a standalone photo service, it would be great, but it’s actually more.
- Integration with the new Live Home page that we’ve only seen in the Connect programme. It’s awesome, I promise.
- Sync your Internet Explorer bookmarks among machines.
Misses
- 25GBs of space that are separated from the Live Mesh service. No comment.
- Better photos that actually antagonize the photo service found in Live Spaces.
- Sync your Internet Explorer Favorites, but not with favorites.live.com . WTF ?!
And let’s see the user survery results that were taken back in March. This is what users were asking:
- Allowing multiple downloads at once.
- Displaying how many times a file has been downloaded.
- Supporting file synchronization from the desktop.
- Providing an API for storing and retrieving files.
- Adding SkyDrive access from Windows Explorer.
NONE OF THESE IS IMPLEMENTED ! And it remains to see how the fuck they will plug the Live Sync service in this.
What happened to the Live teams being feedback driven ?