Share documents, music, pictures and videos with friends and family

Big files are difficult to share, because they cannot be sent as attachments in email. You can upload videos onto youtube or photos into sites like flickr, and then share through links or embedded slideshows/players. They are not always very easy to do and there are privacy concerns. If you do not want to go through all that there is a simple way to store and share huge files online with your friends and family, using Windows Live SkyDrive

After you sign in with your hotmail account, you will see a screen like this

1GB of space is available for free and each file can be upto 50MB, most email services limit this to atmost 10MB.

Now you can create a new folder by clicking C”reate a Folder to Share with Friends” under shared folders,

You can add people, who you will share this folder with, by their email addresses. How convenient!

You can now add files to this folder and then when you click on the file icon you see this

Copy that link and email it or IM it to your friends\family who you added in the list as Readers

You can make them editors if you want them to be able to edit the file too

This is the most simple, secure way of sharing files

More Photo Slideshows

Some friends have pointed that there are many other services that provide embedded Slideshows, like Yahoo’s flickr, Google’s Picassa, Slide.com, RockYou, SlideShare and SplashCast. I haven’t tried all of them out, but Picassa’s slideshow is pretty awesome.

When you have time give it a try.

Slideshows using Silverlight

But now I am going to show you an even kooler form of slideshow. Want to get something that looks like this ?

It is beautiful isn’t it. The only catch is that this is done using a new Microsoft’s software called Silverlight, which might not be available on all user machines. Users will have to download this piece of software (like you download flash to view flash content). The download is very quick, smooth and needed only the first time the user is browsing Silverlight content

Check out the full version at

http://designwithsilverlight.com/tutorials/photoGalleryWall/default.html

Now to set this up on your website, you will need to download it from the Silverlight community samples homepage

http://silverlight.net/community/gallerydetail.aspx?cat=1

Click on download it and follow the instructions in the doc file

[Update:] The download includes a javascript file that will automatically detect if user has silverlight installed and if not offers a link for the user to install.

It can display 16 images.

Your website will look kooler than ever now, thanks to Silverlight and Jeff Paries.

(Note there are several other kool slideshow apps on the Silverlight community gallery page. I haven’t got a chance to try all of them yet, but you might want to give them a try)