Document Sharing Heating Up

Much of the promise behind Web 2.0 involves people sharing things. From photos, to videos, to bookmarks we've seen no shortage of web apps launched to address these niches, but what about documents? It seems like a natural progression to have services that specifically focus their efforts on hosting, aggregating, searching, sharing and embedding documents.

Enter the newly launched Scribd.com which aims to address this segment of the social media market. On Scribd you can upload just about any kind of document and once up on the site, it is available for anyone to view and share. They offer an impressive array of features, including a text-to-speech conversion which allows you to take just about any Word or .PDF document and convert it to an audible MP3 file.

I think this is an interesting and growing space on the web, some have likened it to the YouTube-Digg for documents and spreadsheets.

Another service to keep an eye on in the same vain is Box.net. Box.net is an online storage service that also offers an embeddable web-widget that essentially gives anybody access to view, watch, read or listen to anything in your Box. The possibilities are vast, and the implications for things like music and video are pretty big. I have a feeling Box.net is in the very early stages of building their overall vision and plan for the service, but if done right I think they could do some really interesting things. I'm impressed with what I've seen so far.

Sharing is big. Who knew?

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Document Sharing Heating Up

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