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MySites aims to become the one place you need for your storage needs as well as many other social activities (although it says it’s not a social network). With 10 gb of space, a cool multiple files upload tool, blogging, status updates and messaging as well as many other features, it seems to be a very attractive startup.
MySites is like a cloud service, where you can upload all your files, with a limit of 10 gb at the moment, and access them from anywhere. It makes some very heavy use of Ajax and is built with Ruby, but they wont be showing you fail whales, as they have a custom built scaling cluster. MySites also plans to open its platform, ie open its API to developers so that they can build their applications using MySites infrastructure. Cross-device platform is another feature listed on the website, which means compatibility with mobile devices, consoles and also Mac and other operating systems.
The target audience of MySites are students, artists and gamers. There is a site building tool so that you can build a webpage of your gaming clan or friends group, upload media to it and share it with anyone you want using the privacy controls provided. There are also various modules available for your website needs such as forums, wars module, news feeds, comments, shout boxes, guest books etc. This makes it a viable option for your collaboration needs whether you have a music band, study group or a gaming clan. Gamers are given special focus with special raid modules, which really shows that they are really pleasing the target audiences well.
The uploaded media can be embedded on other websites and blogs, making it a complete back up solution. There is also a desktop uploading tool coming soon from MySites like Live Mesh, which means we might see sync capabilites. Sync features is the buzz word nowadays, as Microsoft and Apple are going head to head with Live Mesh and Mobile Me, respectively. MySites could very well be a competitor in this field to the giants.
The news feed is another feature that was introduced lately in MySites, which works very much like Facebook’s news feed. It shows you what your friends are upto and also lets you vote up or down those feed items. This is very much like a social network. You also get a bit of Twitter with the status updates, except that the updates are not available to those not using MySites. There is a wonderful explorer built in MySites, which really is far better then what Live Mesh offers at the moment. You can view the videos you’ve uploaded right in an overlay window, or listen to music or view a slideshow of the images. With the API opening, we can imagine more file types being viewable right there in the explorer, which makes it potentially the best Web OS at the moment. There are other Online Operating Systems that already provide such features for file viewing, but they are total desktop clones ( and pathetically slow! ) and don’t really take advantage of the best features available for websites and desktops. This is where MySites really shines. It provides you with just one explorer at a time but with thumbnail and detailed views, on the fly thumbnail resizing and sorting options. It even provides you with double clicking so that you can just use it as you would use your computer, but without sacrificing performance.
The main market targeted by MySites is Europe and after that they plan to target Asia. MySites has been busy in sponsoring various Mashable events in recent times in the US. Strangely, they aren’t targeting US with MySites, which comes as a surprise.
While the feature list is very exhaustive, the layout and design of MySites is very confusing to say the least. The blue color is heavily used but then that and white are the only colors you see in the layout. A design overhaul would be very much welcome to raise the bar for the competitors in this field like Mobile Me and Live Mesh. MySites’ design doesn’t show that it’s targeted towards gamers or students. Having so many features already available and a lot more to come, they need to wrap them in a pretty package to attract users at a fast pace.
MySites should jump on the iPhone bandwagon and provide an alternative to Mobile Me for files, bookmarks and calendar synchronization capabilities which would give it an instant boost in the number of users it has. Also, for consoles, it would be a great welcome as it’s already targeted towards gamers, and they could manage their gaming clans right from their consoles, although the console interface would be interesting to see for MySites.
Another little bit you might notice is that MySites doesn’t use the alpha or beta tags, even though it’s still being worked on rapidly ( although the search feature is in beta). And you can also share URL’s with your friends in the from of http://imhassan.mypictur.es for Pictures or http://imhassan.mybuddi.es for Friends, which makes it really self descriptive. There were some occasional errors that we found, but the CEO of MySites, Ramine, has been very positive about feedback.
Do give MySites a try. MySites is full of potential and can improve to give competition to any company out there.
Cool.
I bought a MobileMe subscription, I hope they release their sync program soon so I can cancel it
I think it is good that we see alternatives to the big companies. I wish MySites good luck