Building your own Web with Tubes

Maybe the Internet is a series of tubes after all. Ted Stevens, the octogenarian Republican Senator from Alaska, became the subject of many jokes after he made the following comments about the Internet during a speech on the Senate floor in June 2006. “The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes!”

But now, there is a company that offers an easy-to-use file sharing service called Tubes. An upgrade of the service launched Friday. Steve Chazin, the vice president of marketing for Adesso Systems, the privately held software company, said he hopes that the application was not named in honor of Stevens’ gaffe but as a reference to the old pneumatic tubes used in banks to deliver documents.

So what is Tubes? Chazin said that Tubes lets people create Web sites, or TubeSites, where they can share and store media files. All that needs to be done after downloading the software is for people to drag and drop files into the application, known as a tube. The software is free for 1 GB of storage and after that premium versions cost about $5.95 a month for 5 GB, $10.95 for 10 GB and $20.95 for 20 GB.

What’s most interesting about Tubes is that it is so easy to use. There is no need to figure out any clunky HTML. The whole system is based on dragging and dropping files and then publishing once files are in the tube. Tubes replicates files from a user’s desktop.

Chazin said he thinks Tubes is a compliment to online video sites and social networks like Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp. (NWS)-owned MySpace and Facebook.

But in some respects, Tube is also competition since the company also unveiled Friday something called The Hub, a destination site that lets people browse through other people’s Tubes. The software is also set up so that people can let other users edit and contribute to their sites and that anytime a new file is added to someone’s tube, the file then gets replicated on the desktops of all the other users as well.

It’s cool stuff. And Tubes has already received raves from DiggNation, Slashdot and PC Magazine. So how big could Tubes get?

Well, it has some impressive financial backing so funding should not be a problem. Chazin said a big chunk of the company is owned by the influential private-equity firm The Carlyle Group. What’s more, Tubes is operating in the white-hot area of social networking so future funding should not be a problem. In fact, Chazin said the company is currently on a roadshow looking for more financing.

The big question, of course, is how Tubes will make money. Chazin said Tubes, not surprisingly, plans to eventually generate money from online advertising in addition to fees from its premium services.

Time will tell if Tubes can become a big player in file sharing, or if like poor Ted Stevens, something that gets relentlessly mocked by the Web cognoscenti. But based on the demo of the service that I saw, as well as the fact that it has a prominent investor, I think Tubes will be a service worth keeping an eye on.

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