![]() ![]() The World folder, especially, takes the service well into peer-to-peer file-sharing territory. A search bar lets you find files from within any of these choices. When you first launch Wuala, you'll see four main buttons: My Files, My Friends, My Groups, and World. You can also limit the bandwidth (in kilobits per second) that Wuala consumes, set a local cache size, and turn off the "family friendly" filter, which blocks pornographic images and video and is on by default. One such setting enables file-system integration, which assigns a drive letter to your online storage area-a pretty neat feature that goes beyond what SkyDrive offers. It also makes many more optional settings available to you. This pseudo-install lets you allow Wuala to start when your computer starts, create a desktop icon, and remember your account. Some account features require you to "install" Wuala on your PC, though this doesn't really create a Program entry or folders on the system. You can choose from over 50 clever icons to represent you (the default is a cute orange dinosaur), or you can create your own by pasting an image. Once you've completed your profile, you can enter a Facebook or Skype account, which lets you find Wuala users among your friends in those services. When setting up your account, you create a profile, which can optionally contain an image, your country of residence, the date you were born, your gender, and tags. This is for extra security, but it also means that you'd really better not forget your password. Unlike most online-storage services, Wuala offers no password reminder. Your password serves as the encryption key for your private files, which you alone can retrieve-even Caleido employees can't. It does require somewhat more RAM than the purely browser-based SkyDrive, though navigation is quicker than with the Microsoft service, since you don't have to wait for page loads.Īnyone can see Wuala's publicly shared World folder without creating an account, but to take advantage of the service's benefits, you need to sign up. Wuala does not, however, run within your browser-it's a separate Java application. Assuming you've got that, you just click on the Start button on the wua.la home page to launch the Java app. Wuala requires no download, but you'll need to have Sun's Java runtime installed. AOL's ill-fated Xdrive, with its Adobe AIR desktop client, resembles Wuala even more, but that service is being discontinued. But SkyDrive gives you 5GB of free storage, compared with the mere 1GB Wuala offers gratis. The new service, whose Web site is located at wua.la, competes directly with Freedrive and Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive, which also have public, shared, and private online folders. Though this means that your files may be stored on strangers' PCs, the files are encrypted and sliced up so that a whole file won't be on any single user's system. This beta service's publicly shared media folders resemble what you'd find in a peer-to-peer file-sharing service, as does the option to add more storage to your account by volunteering part of your hard drive to the service's storage grid, thereby saving the company bandwidth costs. Wuala gives online storage a new spin with peer-to-peer storage-grid technology and a Java-based Web application with community features. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |