Music & File Sharing, the GMail way

I wonder how long it’ll take before someone does this, and how long it’ll take the GMail team to stomp it.

What you need:

If on Linux: GmailFS (GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium).If on WinXP: GMail Drive (GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium).

A bunch of music files or videos (limited to 10MB each).

A bunch of friends to share your files with.

1. Simply set up your system -using the above software tools- to mount your GMail 1GB account as a local drive. 2. Copy your music collection to the virtual drive: this will upload each file to GMail as an attachment. 3. Share your login information with your friends (or better yet ask them to install the above software on their system) and let the file sharing begin.

I haven’t tried this yet… but I can’t see why it won’t work. Also, if you need more than 1GB, simply use your GMail invites to invite yourself (ad infinitum) and create more accounts.

Note: Though Google has usually been very open about user extensions to their systems, I believe the implications of this file sharing system -and Google being a public company now- will lead them to actively shut down these initiatives (even if the system has legitimate uses as well).