Web Worker Daily

Peer-to-Peer file exchange is nothing new. Enthusiasts have been getting their media (and getting sued over getting their media) via P2P services for years. What’s a more recent trend, and one that keeps the lawyers away, is P2P-like services that are personal and direct. Instead of opening your data up to the world, you are directly connected to the digital media carried on your friend’s computer and you have total control over who connects to you and downloads what you have to share.

Tubes is one such Friend-to-Friend service, treating your collections of connections to your friends/colleagues as if they were IM buddies. It’s that simple. GigaOM covered the application’s launch a few months ago. Instead of exchanging text snippets of thought, you’re “conversing” in files. Read on for an overview of the latest Tubes beta. It should also be noted that Tubes drew WWD’s attention by recently announcing that the service now caters to Mac users. But there’s a catch…

Add Tubes like you add IM buddies. Tubes can be based on an individual, a topic, an application or whatever you like. Create a Tube around a work project and then invite your colleagues to join. Drag & drop files, any files, onto the Tube’s icon and that media is quickly pushed to everyone you’re sharing with. If they are not already a Tubes user, they receive an email inviting them to download the software and be connected to the Tube.

The actual files are stored locally on your hard drive, and kept in sync through the Tube service. Installation is smooth, friendly and simple. Aside from sharing photos and videos, there are practical applications for the web worker. I can see using a Tube to keep the latest versions of key documents in sync between multiple co-workers or clients, while at the same time sharing photos with friends and family. Quite often these applications force you to decide whether it’s for work or “play” by how it’s configured. You can have work and personal buddies mixed together in your IM list, why not in your file sharing client? The interface is playful enough to appeal to the casual user, and clean enough to be taken seriously by folks wanting to get work done.

Tubes is in beta, so it does have its quirks. For starters, you can’t direct the storage file to another drive or location. It sits in your “My Documents” folder and you’re stuck with that. You do have the option to select whether or not you want to automatically fetch every file in the Tube, or pick what you want to store locally (helpful if your friend decided that 35 GB of data just had to be shared in his Tube). There doesn’t appear to be an easy way of telling when new content has been added, as the interface just gives an overall file count. In my testing, the application did hang during sync a few times, requiring me to close and re-open it to successfully update the file count and complete the sync.

Tubes requires Windows XP or Vista and Microsoft .NET Framework. But wait? Didn’t I say that it now caters to Mac users? Here’s the catch…Tubes has optimized its features for Parallels, bypassing direct Mac OS X support altogether. That means that if you are on an Intel Mac, and if you have Parallels installed ($70 for the software, $200 give or take for the operating system) then running the free Tubes application is a no-brainer. You can drag & drop files right from the Mac OS X Finder to the Tubes window, either in Coherence mode or in OS Window mode. Only you can decide if that’s enough Mac compatibility to try this service. Could this signal a trend for Windows-only developers that won’t bode well for those allergic to Microsoft’s operating systems? Maybe.