Box.net- Great Concept, Bad Pitch

Last week Brian, an intern working at box.net emailed me the following email:

My name is Brian, I’m an intern working at Box.net. I saw your blog post about  firefox add-on, and wanted to let you know Box just made one that backs up and synchronizes your bookmarks.https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5525 Its very simple, you can set it to auto update you bookmarks so they are synchronized wherever you go, or you can manually backup and restore bookmarks. The bookmarks are then stored on Box.net, and can be access anywhere. I thought I would write to let you know, in case you were interested in writing about it on your blog, and had any questions. Thanks, Please let me know if you have any suggestions for how to improve it! Sincerely, Brian

The first thing that caught my eye was that I had never written a post about a Firefox add-on.

Ever.

So why was Brian informing me I did and then trying to promote his company Box.net?

I decided to do a little research to check the validity of this email. A simple Google search for various combinations of “Brian”, “intern”, and “Box.net” reveals various blogs here, here, there, oh and there that all got a similar pitch all referring to some blog post and promoting there special something.

So everything seemed valid and the website itself has a nice idea. It utilizes the idea of an online storage so that you can upload lots of files and be able to access them from anywhere that has the internet.

But Brian’s pitch was a big turn-off for me. I was almost going to mark it as spam because it was so bogus. Notice the extra space between “about” and “firefox add-on” that seems like it was some format that he just pasted words into.

So to be fair and not a jerk, I did try the add-on and made an account on Box.net trying the bookmarks feature and it was nice. Simple and easy to set-up and access all the time.

The problem was I don’t really have a huge list of bookmarks (I just finished organizing it) since I noticed most of them were old or blogs that I just put into Google Reader. I can honestly say I only have 15 bookmarks that I check daily and most of them are memorized (Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Facebook, etc). So I can safely say I won’t be using this any more unless for some reason my computer and brain go boom and the backup will be a nice feature.

So there you go Brian, I did end up giving you your review anyways. I also want to thank you too because you were my first pitch and that makes this blog feel important. We were prominent enough for an intern at a fascinating start-up like Box.net to email us a pitch and it felt nice.

Bur for future references Brian, check over your email and maybe make it more personal. Email me again anytime =D

~Kevin X