I have had a Box.net account for some time now. I got it (along with an Omnidrive account) when I was originally researching Web 2.0 applications, partly with an eye on my thesis, and partly with an eye on devising new courses at Arcada.

It hasn’t been very useful really.

Not that there is anything specific wrong with it, you understand. The uploading and downloading has always been smoother than the alternatives that I have explored, although not necessarily as fast. Omnidrive has opted for a desktop application that looks and feels like another internal drive, and when that works it is more intuitive than opening a browser. Having said that, in my experience it doesn’t work – at least not if you are planning to upload a whole folder structure.

Box.net does work: not very speedily but certainly reliably. My problem, in short, is that I have never really found any compelling reason to use it.

Recently I was thinking about Box.net, not having used it much for a couple of months; and I was wondering what I considered wrong with it. Nothing very much, was what I decided. It just didn’t have anything very compelling to offer me. It gave me one gigabyte of free online storage – but a lot of my files were already being stored on Zoho’s servers; my mail was being stored in various places; my photographs were at Flickr; and this site contains most of the rest. So what was it for?

My first insight came a week or so ago. I had installed the Foxmarks plug-in to enable me to synchronise the bookmarks on my various computers (my laptop, the home computer, and my roaming profile at Arcada). This worked very nicely but it stored my bookmarks on the Foxmarks server, wherever that is. This made me remember that once upon a time I had relied on another online bookmarks service which had simply disappeared one day.

It also reminded me that the UPS comics application on Facebook had disappeared without warning two or three weeks ago. The relevance of this is that it was the foundation of my Facebook profile. I read the comics every day, and I missed them when they were gone. Things come and things go, so it is best to be careful where you place your trust – and your data.

Then I discovered the Box.net Backup Firefox plug-in which was effectively the same thing rewritten to use your Box.net account to store the synchronisation data. Box.net started to make sense to me then. They have been around long enough that I don’t expect them to disappear next week. They automatically sync my bookmarks, and the xml file is in my account where I can see it, and directly manipulate it if I want to.

Then this week an entry in the Zoho blogs pointed me towards the new OpenBox service, so I went to find out about it – and the whole service suddenly made sense. They have found a position in the datasphere that they can usefully occupy, and that makes sense of all the other services that I use.

OpenBox is a platform that enables developers to write widgets that can add functionality to your Box. You can, for example, view any text file stored in your Box using Zoho’s tools. You can edit any photograph using Picnik. You can publish these using Scribd - all the time keeping the data itself in your Box.

You can then share any file, or folder; or publish it to make it universally available.

There are many reasons why putting these things together is potentially very useful indeed. Not only does your data remain in one place, which might be useful for security reasons, it means that you can publish things to multiple places simply and easily, and then update multiple versions in one go.

Effectively I can write online in Zoho Writer; store the documents in my Box; and then publish the ones I want to make public in Scribd. This is a complete authorial workflow, and Box.net are promising that there is more to follow.

I have now understood how this might fit into my life, and I like it.