Twitter users can now share an unlimited number of files of up to 9 GB each for free through Fyels.com, thanks to a new offering by the recently launched file hoster. Fyels is offering Twitter users unlimited storage space through so-called personal drives, as Fyels.com hopes to use Twitter’s large user base to pre-populate its own offering.
Twitter users can simply go to http://theirtwitterusername.fyels.com to claim their personal drive and then authenticate their account through Twitter’s OAuth implementation. Fyles also includes embedded audio and video players for various media file types, making it a great solution to quickly share video footage via Twitter. Check out my own Fyels drive here.
Fyles is being developed by Omnissient, a company based in Brisbane, Australia, and Omnissient Director Dominic Holland told me via email that Fyles was originally just meant to be a tool to help with the development of other projects. “Being developers we are constantly moving files between computers and servers and we wanted a fast and free way to do that without time, or monetary restraints,” he said.
However, Fyles took off right away, and is now well on its way to attract 80,000 registered users within one month of its launch, said Holland. His company took this as a sign to concentrate on the service and sideline all other projects.
Fyles utilizes HTML5 for its user interface, and the back-end is also state of the art: “The platform utilizes Redis/NOSQL for the database engine, hence the speed”, explained Holland. “It runs across a number of large EC2 instances and storage is hosted with S3 and we utilize the Cloudfront CDN for all downloads.”
Holland told me that his company wants to offer the service ad-free for the time being. “We do have monetization strategies in mind, but they are absolutely not being a key focus for us at this stage,” he said, adding that the main goal for now is to grow the site’s user base.
To be honest, I’m a little sceptical how sustainable this will be. I’ve seen plenty of start-ups offer free file hosting plans, only to quickly scale down its offering in face of exorbitant bandwidth and storage bills. S4ve.as and Podmailing are only two that come to mind. That being said, Fyles does look like a great service, so let’s hope it stays around for at least a little while.
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