Excite Does a Little Portal Trendsetting

Baldwin Louie — Fri, 07 May 1999 15:00:00 -0700

It's no secret that the big portals want to become the desktops of the Internet.

That's why there are Web-based applications like free e-mail, calendars and address books on Yahoo (YHOO), Excite (ATHM) and others. The reasoning is that these applications will not only increase the number of people who use the sites, but also keep them there longer. Until now, however, portals have shied away from hosting users' files on the Net. Why? The fear that storage would eat up valuable bandwidth.

But last week Excite signed a deal with Seattle-based Punch Networks to get the capability to publish and share personal files, such as text documents, spreadsheets and graphics, via the Web. To many, it's a preview of the next big thing on the portals, because the service is both "sticky" (invites people to stay on sites for long periods) and "viral" (likely to be passed on by word of mouse).

"Excite realizes that file sharing is good from a stickiness standpoint and a viral standpoint," says Dan Campi, CEO of Punch Networks. "They have a chance to pull in two or three other users for each user who has a file online."

The technology works like this: A person goes to Excite's site and uploads a file from his hard drive to an account on the portal. When it's posted, other people can download the file to their hard drives and make changes on their desktops. Then, these people can re-upload the changes they've made directly to the original on the Web, bypassing the bandwidth-heavy task of uploading the whole file again. The file is then marked with a description of who changed what and when.

Excite chose to partner with Punch precisely because Punch users only need to upload changes, not entire files. "The updating feature of the technology was the most attractive feature to us," says David Williams, director of content at Excite.

The basic technology isn't new. Visto, for one, allows people to do many of the same things, but it provides its file-sharing technology in a suite of applications that includes free e-mail and calendar services. To Visto, without the entire suite of applications, and the integration among them, file sharing isn't important.

"The larger portals are trying to fill out their feature sets," says Steven Cox, VP of marketing at Visto. "But our vision is that integration is the key, and that file sharing needs to be in a combination with other things."

Visto has had talks with the major portals about offering some, if not all, of its services to their users. In fact, Theglobe.com uses the company's calendar and address book. But so far, none of the major players have expressed much interest in Visto's vision.

Still, collaborative Web-based applications are clearly gaining momentum. Last week, ActiveTouch unveiled WebEx Offices, which allows real-time sharing of presentations, applications, documents and browsers within a digital-office context.

Some venture capitalists have spotted the trend, but suspect file-sharing services may make more sense as technology than as independent companies. "We've seen a bunch of people who are talking about file sharing right now," says Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. "We're deciding whether it's a stand-alone business or not."

While Yahoo has explored file sharing and storing, it hasn't committed itself to a technology. The issue isn't bandwidth. Yahoo users simply haven't been clamoring for file sharing, says Ellen Siminoff, Yahoo's VP of business development and strategic planning. "It's an area we're exploring because it targets business users," she says. "But I don't know that there is a huge use for file sharing yet."

There's also the privacy issue. Theoretically, the main market for this kind of technology is business travelers, who by nature have sensitive company documents on their hard drives. One CEO of a San Francisco software company says that he wouldn't be quick to adopt file sharing on the Net. He doesn't want prying eyes on his files.

Punch Networks' Campi says that the association with Excite should increase the comfort factor: "Once you know you're dealing with a brand name like Excite, your trust level goes up," he says.

Excite is banking that the trust issue will resolve itself when enough people begin using the technology - just like it did for e-commerce. If the recent portal chorus of "anything you can do, I can do better" continues, and if Excite does find that people are spending more time online using file sharing, other portals may not be far behind.

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Excite Does a Little Portal Trendsetting