online friends

Devices that are wuala clients but that aren't actually interactively used could identify themselves as such. In addition there could be an idle timer that gets reset when the user does something. The situation isn't really different than with the IM clients.

Well for me, the online friends stuff, as well as the forums is something that , i think, would be make Wuala a killer app.
The main advantage of wuala is not the storage but the possibility of sharing that storage with other people.
Any community feature: IM, forums etc would help build the community in my opinion. If you see that a friend is online on Wuala you may ask him something or talk to him.
I don't have any use case in mind but it seems clear, at least to me, that wuala is more than a storage system, or am i mistaken?
Giving storage will make Wuala a rapidshare-like application with a client. Adding community stuff could make wuala as strong as, say, facebook or Myspace...... again, it's my opinion, perhaps i misunderstood your strategy :-)

Wuala is more than a storage system, or am i mistaken?

Yes it is and no it isn't ;)
Wuala is not Rapidshare which is just there to transfer a file over the net. Wuala is not about the file, but about the content. You can put files into a common context, add descriptions etc. and even talk about them via the comment section. These possibilities will be expanded, for sure.
However the idea currently is to do one thing good, instead of doing many things mediocre. The strategy for the moment is to integrate everything around the content of the file and integrate with the web and other applications for additional services.

Let me give you an example. Of course we could add VOIP to Wuala. However that would have two disadvantages. First of all it would cannibalise the time our programmers' time to make the core features of Wuala better. Secondly, even if we would add VOIP, it is unlikely that we could invest enough time to be as good as competitors.

Of course this is some kind of a fine line. What is core to Wuala and what is not? A discussion board like feature for groups might actually be a very good idea. Adding a chat feature would be most likely rather annoying to many people, who already have two chat clients running besides Wuala.

But that is only my 2c and even that might change. Wuala is still very fluid right now and if we see that a majority of users actually want or need a certain feature in Wuala, that is very important to our decision making.

Yes, I agree, we don't need another IM network. How about implementing a Jabber server in wuala client? that way you can use external programs for the actual communication and would allow for same IM names as Wuala names. That way you can leave chat and VOIP functionality for whatever programs the users choose to use.

To jiten: my point exactly.

Who's talking about VOIP ??? As a matter of fact, i work in the internet industry, online gaming industry in fact and we did launch of site without a good forum in the beginning for different reasons.
i think that was a mistake, 1st because it would have been a good tool for the community, second it would have been a good marketing tool for us to understand what our players were expecting.....wich is more cheaper than a post test believe me :-)
in france we have an expression "le mieux est l'ennemi du bien", wich is hard to translate sorry about that..... what i mean is i don't think we need 3D avatars, VOIP or stuff too complicated to implement and of course that costs a lot...
A forum would be a great start, it's quite easy to implement with vbulletin or smf and the forum would help you get a feedback about what the community really wants......

butthen again it's just my opinion ;-)