izimi: Self-publishing for the masses

I had the priviledge this evening of speaking with the founders of a new website called izimi. It’s a new website that allows you to publish and serve files to anyone with an internet connection and a web browser.

I’ll be honest, at first I didn’t really get it. I mean what’s the difference between using izimi, and uploading your videos to YouTube your photos to flickr or your documents to GoogleDocs. My problem was I’ve been doing webpages for people so long I’ve become very familiar with FTP software and I’d just throw my files I wanted to share onto one of my domains and send people a link.

izimi is all about making it easy for the everyday person to share their files with others without knowing what FTP is, much less knowing how to use it.

The other benefit that izimi gives the user is complete control over their files. See, when you upload your files to somewhere else, you’ve lost control, and in some cases maybe even ownership of the files. izimi gives you absolute control of both. The app also provides easy to remember URL’s for your files. For example, files I’d serve would be something like http://bnpositive.izimi.com/0000.izimi. I should also clarify that this is not a peer-to-peer application like Napster, Limewire or something like that. This is peer-to-browser, which makes it that much easier for the people you’re trying to serve files to from your computer.

The only thing the site requires is a small 3MB download localized application that sets up your computer to serve the files to users when they need them. This is another hurdle for me to get over, because I’m normally not a big fan of setting up software that continually runs, but keeps a connection open to my machine via the internet. However, after speaking with David Ingram, VP of Product Marketing and Marc Lyne, CEO of izimi, they’ve addressed my concerns:

1. Security: you can read more about their responses on their FAQ’s
2. Privacy: can I restrict some files with a password only for certain users/friends? – Currently the feature set is purely a public forum, however the application makes it very easy to remove a file from availability.
3. ISP Restrictions: How does my ISP feel about this product? – I think this may become an issue once the service becomes more popular. It basically uses your ISP to serve as a file server which may be against your terms of service. Just have to wait and see if it’s an issue.
4. Processor/CPU Hogging: What’s the impact to my system serving all these files as I begin sharing more and more and more users get added to the system? – Negligible, but again can be monitored and managed as you see fit.

Here’s what I can see myself doing at some point in the future though. I’ve got two old machines I’ve been wondering what I could really do with. With izimi, I could very easily strip them down to bare bones systems, install izimi and begin serving hundreds of files if I needed, while keeping everything separate from my main system. As soon as they implement some additional privacy/password-protected features, I can make entire directories of files available only to myself or friends and family and access documents I need from anywhere!

On top of the application and functionality itself, the other half of izimi is the social networking type portal their website becomes for people to share files and documents with an ever growing population and public publishers.

I’ll be keeping an eye on izimi now and see how they continue to develop this product. I’ll be sure and uncover their next steps and let you know as well.