Founded in early 2007, Wixi has continually added more functionality, and at this point is an quite amazing service. While being more Gamma than Beta, Wixi appears to be a feature complete service – allowing you to easily upload, manage, view and share media. I didn’t encounter any issues while using the service – no errors or freezes – and enjoyed reasonable fast uploads (200-300KB/s). I didn’t expect that a service using a mix of JavaScript and Flash will behave so consistent and snappy.

Wixi’s interface – clearly designed to appeal even the least computer-savvy users – resembles your desktop – windows, menus and, of course, a wallpaper of your choosing.

One of Wixi’s strong points is the ability to set access levels to files; private, friends or public. You wouldn’t want to share your final essay with the whole world, would you? Because you can pick individual people with which you want  to share a file or a folder, you can work together with your friends on a project, and not worry about sending each revision over email to the other participants.

Once you invited your friends to Wixi, you are automatically updated with their public activity via the Friends Activity Report. Arranged by media type, you could find pictures that your girlfriend took on the trip, or just as easily, the new school timetable posted by a colleague. Wixi has a lot of real-life uses that differentiate it from the other storage services – because of the tight integration with social aspects.

Social tools on the site allow users to interact with their friends online, across campus or across the globe, sharing a cool new song or photos of a recent vacation or family event. For those without access to their computers, Wixi offers long-distance access to media files. Registered members can also meet fellow users, browsing their Wixis, discovering new media and expanding their social circles.

Wixi also enables you to discover new content by simply browsing other people’s public ‘wixis’; if you find something you like, you can leave a message, save the file to your Wixi or request to be friends with that person.

Another interesting feature is ‘Web Channels’. Recently implemented, Web Channels lets you search, save and view content from YouTube, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, CNN and MTV Music.

With offices in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and half a million dollars in funding, Wixi has set a high goal for itself, ‘a world-class community for millions of users’. Their goal is far from unattainable if they continue adding features, maintaining the service reliable and easy to use. Wixi certainly gets my thumbs up, with the same concerns I have for any cloud storage service: privacy and data safety.

You can sign up for free at wixi.com; the free option gives you 3GB of storage and just a couple of restrictions, such as streaming files under 100MB. The premium option removes al the restrictions and gives you unlimited storage.

The first 50 readers who send an email leave a comment on the blog will get an code for the premium service; If you want to say thanks, include in your email a cool service, website or software you’ve discovered or a topic you’d like me to cover. This will help me pick future stories according to your interests.

As always, I love hearing what you think, in the comments. Have you previously used Wixi or a similar service? What could be improved?

One of the startups coming in at the Demo ‘09 Conference, Sobees is of value to any social network addict – and everyone is these days. Using the intuitive interface you can create your own desktop widgets, each customized to your own preferences – from Twitter Search on a topic to pictures uploaded by your friends on Flickr – you can mix and mash to create your own personal news room. The customization potential of this app is literally unlimited and it’s dead simple to use:

• Pick a template

• Pick a service, a search term or a RSS feed.

Other functionalities worth mentioning:

• Your status is published on all the social networks you’re logged into.
• There are integrated weather notifications.
• Also Flickr photo uploading.

But not all is good about Sobees – because unfortunately there is no Mac or Linux version, and the Windows version is based on .NET Framework 3.5 which not even Microsoft used to create their most recent operating system, Windows 7. In fact, there supposedly was a rule against any code written in .NET.

• On my up-to-date, fully-patched and cleaned Windows XP system, Sobees was sluggish, froze 2-3 seconds when adding new widgets and there’s clearly something wrong with the Anti-aliasing of the titles.
• The Search function only works with Yahoo! and Windows Live! Search, a big disappointment for an app that is all about customizability.
• Uses too much memory, 125MB with only one widget open. Too much transparency, translucency and other flashy effects; a black stylish interface would have achieved a better effect without using so much resources.

Like David Chartier from Ars stated, it’s really hard to stay excited about Sobees after the initial jump; while the ‘taskbar for the web’ concept is original, it certainly wasn’t developed enough – but after all this is a beta.

You can get Sobees from here and help the developers by submitting feedback. As always I look forward to your comments about desktop applications for web apps.