YouSendIt: HOV Lane for Large Files?

I heard some big numbers from the YouSendIt folks yesterday. Ivan Koon (who ran the PDF business unit at Adobe) and Florian Brody (who was the marketing director for Amazon's A9), said that over 400 million files have been sent through their just-out-of-beta file delivery service. That amounts to over 30 TB of daily data transfer. When we made arrangements to meet a few weeks ago, they had 1 million registered users; now they're counting down to the 2 million mark.

YouSendIt's value proposition is simple. They offer an alternate channel for sending and receive large email attachments. Just select the files from your computer and enter their intended destination. YouSendIt will store them for 7-14 days, during which designated recipients can download them at their convenience. It's a clever twist on email hosting *and* shared storage/online collaboration. It's both, it's neither and it's in demand. 30 TB/day is a lot of data!

Ivan says that his engineering team is working on plug-ins for Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo Mail to give users one-click access just when they need it. Did they really want to clog up their client's mailbox with that 50 MB presentation?? And if you ask nicely, he'd be happy to build a customized interface for your webmail system (or an Outlook add-on to give to your customers) and share any resulting fees.

I think YouSendIt is awesome. Like DreamHost's music store service, it's a new way of monetizing traditional web hosting assets. Ivan maintains server hardware and connectivity just as you do, but because of the way his service is packaged and marketed, he is gaining very rapid momentum.