Mike Arrington writes about the disruptive nature of CNet's AllYouCanUpload photo site, and how it's going to impact other offerings of this nature:

AllYouCanUpload is a site that makes uploading photos as easy as it can possibly get. They’ve removed all of the friction. You do not need to register for an account. You just use the uploading tool and you are shown the image along with codes to post the photo on sites like Myspace, ebay and others (I’d also like an option to have the image links emailed to me). Unlike Photobucket and Imageshack, AllYouCanUpload is completely free, and no advertisements appear on the uploading areas of the site (there are ads on the hosted part of the site, which you see if you click on a hosted image). There is no limit to the number of photos that can be uploaded or the total amount of storage that may be consumed. There is no limit on the size of an image, and images are not resized unless you request it. And possibly most importantly, there are absolutely no bandwidth restraints.

What struck me is something else, and it's a trend that started with gmail - storage space is now so cheap that companies aren't even bothering to charge for it. How cheap? Well, I was at CompUSA two days ago, and ran across this drive: a one terabyte Maxtor drive. It's being marketed as a one touch backup solution, and it's being sold for $899.

I still recall buying my second 40 MB hard drive back in the 80's, and thinking to myself that I was set - no way I'd need more space than that :) Now I have a 256 MB USB keychain lying around, and there are things like the Maxtor drive for sale. With storage effectively unlimited, all we need now is reasonably fast (and bi-directional) network access. At that point, "the network is the computer" may actually be true.