Web Worker Daily

With the Web 2.0 Expo upon us, you’re going to see a lot of site announcements in the next week or so. One that look immediately useful for the web worker is Egnyte, which just went into beta. They’re playing in the same general space as Microsoft Groove or Tubes: applications that let you designate information for sharing on one computer, back it up into the internet cloud when it changes, and then pull it down on to multiple computers when you want it.

So what’s different about Egnyte? It’s still under development, but a few things stand out:

• They’ve already got a (pre-beta) native Mac client.
• You can share individual e-mail messages (Outlook, Gmail, Thunderbird, or POP) as well as files.
• You can tag the information you upload (using their web interface) for easier searching, though I suspect this two-step process would get cumbersome in practice.
• Changed files are automatically versioned and archived (”last-one-wins” conflict control).

Egnyte is launching with free accounts with 1GB of storage space, and promises of upgrade options (presumably not free) in the future. Particularly if you’ve been waiting for a native Mac entrant in this product category, they should be worth keeping an eye on.