Disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of R/WW.
Late last week, Web Office
provider Zoho and online storage company Omnidrive announced a partnership,
allowing users to edit a Zoho office document and save directly into Omnidrive. Also,
both Omnidrive and Zoho released APIs. The news
has already been covered in-depth elsewhere – e.g.
TechCrunch and Zoli’s Blog. As
Zoli Erdos pointed out in his post, the partnership is a useful step forward in seamless
on-and-offline computing.
The other thing of interest is how both companies are working on data standards for
web apps and storage. Omnidrive is positioning itself as a central data provider for not
just Zoho, but over time for other web applications too. As Omnidrive CEO Nik Cubrilovic
told me in an email:
“…right now we let our users read/write files to various web apps through our ‘live
folders’. For eg. You can create a Flickr live folder which will let you read/write your
Flickr files, in the similar way the above partnership with Zoho works. The whole point
is to allow users to bring together not only all their desktop data, but also all their
data from the various different web applications they use.”
Omnidrive plans to develop a standard protocol for web applications to read/write to
storage providers such as Omnidrive, and their LiveFolders format will become an open
protocol. Omnidrive and Zoho are also working on a set of standards for
application-to-storage communications.
I hope we see more of these types of partnerships between web app providers – and more
data standards that others can adopt. The big companies have a part to play too, but
don’t hold your breath for open data standards from Microsoft or Google.
In the end it’s all part of the best-of-breed ecosystem for web apps, which gives
power back to the user to choose which apps to use for which tasks. That’s the ideal
web world anyway, but we’ll see how it pans out.
