Knock yourself out with more free storage

It is crazy! When you add up all of the storage that various Web applications providers are willing to give you, there are tens of gigabytes available to anyone simply for signing up on half-a-dozen sites.

Here’s another free dollop of disk space available for your personal use: Streamload, a content sharing platform that offers, for free, 25GB of secure and private storage with 100MB of downloads per month.

Streamload provides a well-designed and quite slick AJAX-based user interface. To improve your use of the service there are several free client side utilities:

*Streamload Downloader – which contrary to its name uploads as well – for Windows (a similar tool for all platforms written in Perl is also available).

*StreamExplorer and StreamTree that store the folder structure of your Streamload account locally on your computer and present it in tree form.

*Streamload Catalog, which provides a, well, catalog of your online content.

All of these utilities rely on the Streamload StreamBeam API and the company provides the source for the Streamload Downloader as a starting point. Making the platform API open and available for end user innovation is a really interesting approach to building a content sharing service.

There are a few restrictions on how you can use the Streamload service, which focuses on any behavior that attempts to circumvent Streamload’s account restrictions or is illegal.

Streamload claims considerable popularity: “The service launched online in April 2000 and now has more than 20,000 subscribers around the world … Several large businesses have also discovered Streamload including New Mexico State University – NMSU uses Streamload to securely host more than 1,000 hours of audio recordings for its 25,000 students.”

If the basic free account isn’t enough for you there are paid-for accounts with unlimited storage based on download volume starting at $4.95 per month for up to 2G bytes of downloads per month.

So now that I’ve signed up with Streamload I’m up to around 400G bytes of storage. What on earth can I do with it all?