What I’m going to do today, is to show how company can integrate their existing services with Facebook.

Company that I’ll take as example is Box.net. Company was founded in 2005, they are specialising in online storage solutions and they were the first company to provide this service. For those who don’t know, online storage means that you can store, retrieve and share you files on the web and access them from anywhere. All you need is a web browser. Box.net also provides an open API for accessing the data. Company has 1.2 million users with over a million files served each day.

To expand and get more users Box.net wrote an application for Facebook, which allows accessing and using Box.net services directly from your Facebook account.

All you have to do is to add their application (if you don’t have an account with Box.net, they allow you to create one immediately, registration process is very simple an literally takes 10 seconds).

There’s very subtle, but yet effective viral marketing item. If you invite your friend to Box.net application, you’ll get extra 20MB of storage for each friend you invite.

Using the service is pretty straightforward:

• Add (remove) folders
• Upload files
• Share folders/files
• View (access) you friend’s files

User interface is minimalistic and very intuitive:

Overall impression is very good, and the service is quite useful. If you want to share something between your friends this application is a must have. I may try to be picky here and note that 20MB for free these days isn’t the greatest deal, but the ease of use and convenience might overweight the limitation. If you need more storage, pricing is very attractive and is only 2$/month for extra 2GB.

It also serves as a good example on how easy is to expand your business into Facebook arena and start enjoying the growing user base. Box.net already attracted over 71,000 users with over 1,400 active daily users. Box.net themselves recognise the importance of this move and I’m happy that Facebook application pool has really useful applications, besides all the fun stuff.