I came across TubesNow, a product developed by Adesso Systems and it has officially launched to the public yesterday for free (pdf). It is an application that enable users to create their own private sharing spaces just by sending an email invitation. This product is based on a very simple idea, i.e. share the content from their client PCs with their contacts in a secured environment. Moreover, this application utilized a technology that can replicating content changes among synchronized multiple Tube users. According to this article, this replication technology will enable Tubes to fill a void between e-mail and Web-based collaboration tools such as Windows SharePoint. However, there is limitation of using this application, a user can only store the content for each Tube that not more than 2G - room for about few large PowerPoint file sizes. Also, one must fulfill the minimum requirements as follow in order to run this application: Windows XP Service Pack 2, 256 MB of RAM at least, and Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework must included in the client PC as well. But one notable thing is the management of Adesso Systems, they have years of background in software industry and its vice president was attached to Apple before and you will read that the founder of Adesso Systems was the former CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at Lotus Notes from this post.

For readers that interested in this application, you can download it from this sign-up page. But you must login before download. But I believed this application is not that user-friendly to a novice, albeit that it is a share folder types of application, a user must learn how to use it particularly in the instance of granting the other party the varying privileges, lock some specific folders into a read-only mode, and etc folders related tasks.

To sum up this post, this is a peer-to-peer file sharing application and I particularly like the user interface of it.

Update: TubesNow services has been discontinued with effective from January 31, 200. Below is the official message from Tubes:

Announcement posted at 8:00 EST on 14 January 2008 - The Tubes service will be going away as of Jan 31, 2008.

Thank you for participating in our beta program. The Tubes Team