I first learned of PiXPO a couple of years ago when the app was focused on peer-to-peer sharing of photos through a desktop application interface. The company did a great job of letting you create private photo albums only viewable by a defined set of friends and family who needed to authenticate to access your images. That version of the application is now long gone, replaced by a simple solution for sharing photos, video and music files online by way of a desktop client. Rather than uploading all your files to the Web, PiXPO relies on files stored on your local machine. You simply add files on your hard drive to the list of shared files and then point friends and family to the URL where they may be found. This is much easier from the sharing side of the equation because you don't need to know anything about uploading files to a service; it just works. On the other side of the coin, your files become unavailable as soon as you shutdown your computer. Files are streamed directly on the PiXPO site and you can keep friends and family informed of new postings either by sending them email updates or convincing them to subscribe to your RSS feed. The RSS isn't quite perfect since it only gives you a headline and doesn't actually pull down the files, but that might be for the best since you're sharing off your own computer. True private sharing was replaced by not publishing certain channels on the general PiXPO network, allowing you to keep a semi obscured set of files to share only with close friends and family. Overall this new iteration of PiXPO is easier to use both for sharing and viewing content, but it removed some of the most compelling reasons for buying the previous pay version. If you want an easy way to share files and have a broadband connection to support the sharing, I recommend giving PiXPO a whirl. [Windows 98/2k/XP $0.00]
