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Personal

• Use personal folders to back up important files that are only for you.
• Get to your files from any computer with Internet access by signing in with your Windows Live ID.

Shared

• Shared folders make it easy to collaborate with coworkers or classmates.
• You decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read what's there: others can add and delete files.
• Everyone who is sharing uses their own Windows Live ID.

Public

• With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can't change them.
• Want to show your public files to others? Just send them a link! Each folder and file has its own web address.

After the intial signin to the service, the user is presented with the Folders homepage, showing the 3 folder types that can be created, as well as some default folders and a storage capactiy meter. After creating your own folders, these will appear on your homepage too. My storage meter says 250MB for the time being the beta should have more.

Windows Live Folders it not a difficult to use service, folder creation is straightforward, as it the uploading of files. Microsoft is aiming Windows Live Folders towards a large as market as possible, so the basic procedures need to be simple to promote adoption amongst the less tech-savy. The use of ajax to create new folders is nice, though the rest of the site could do with a little too. As we've seen with Windows Live Hotmail though, too much of a good thing can be bad.

Where Windows Live Folders gets slightly more technical is around folder options, in particular sharing folders between your friends. The process however is similar to sharing your Windows Live Spaces between friends, with the difference being you can chose the role of your friends - either reader or contributer. Much like with FTP services, reader only allows the contact read access to the folder and files, whereas contributer allows them to upload, edit and delete files as well. Creating publicly available files is as easy as private files and once you're done, its a one-click process to share them via email. You can view my public folder here (now offline).

While Windows Live Folders appears to be a very basic service at the moment, that will surely change of the coming months, especially if a client is forthcoming. Performance and usability is probably the highest we've seen for any Windows Live beta, so the future definitely looks good.