GEEK OUT: Networked Hard Drive Edition

So... occasionally I'll happen across something of a technological nature that I think is really awesome, but a great deal of people might not. For example, I described the gadget I'm soon to talk about to my wife last night and her response was a kind of "mmm hmmm" in so many words. But that's okay, prepare to have your collective minds blown.

What will do said exploding to you? Why, the Pogoplug® of course. Ha, you may scoff, how could something with such a retarded name be so profoundly awesome? (I may be exaggerating at this point, but bear with me). Well, let me describe what it does for you first. Essentially, it'll take any sort of hard drive or thumb drive and turn it into a network drive, no fuss, no muss. What that means is that any hard drive you have can be accessible by any computer on your home network or over the internet. Okay, perhaps you're a bit underwhelmed right now, but let me describe a few scenarios of how this could be really handy.

Scenario one: let's say you're chatting with your buddy about your awesome music collection and you'd really, really like to share an album with him, but you're nowhere near your computer. That's no problem with your Pogoplug®! You jump on his computer, log in to my.pogoplug.com and wala, all of your music collection is instantly available to download onto your friends computer because you have your hard drive with all your music plugged into your Pogoplug®. You can even preview the songs in the browser! The same goes for videos, documents, whatever; whatever you put on your hard drive instantly available over the internet through the Pogoplug®.

I'm sounding like an advertisement, but stick with me here. If you're a Mac user, you might be familiar with Time Machine, a really easy way to backup your stuff built into OS X Leopard. Well, with a Pogoplug®, you can now use Time Machine on any Mac you've got on your network and back that puppy up to your networked drive! That way, more than one computer at a time can work with the same backup hard drive. This, of course, would also work with Windows but it'd be a different process (read: not as easy).

Basically, the idea is that all of your information would be accessible from one central location and accessible anywhere you go, whether it's between computers in the same house, or you're at someone else's house. It's not that this hasn't been possible before, it certainly has. But it's now easier, and cheaper (only $99), to do this than it ever has been. Anybody can set this up (maybe).

So did anybody else out there see the potential in this device, or are you "mmm hmmming" me?