At DEMOfall 07 the usual assortment of applications with a twist on social networking, media sharing and shared workspaces were introduced. Between ZDNet and CNET Webware we covered the majority of the products demoed.
Tubes Networks also unveiled a product with social networking and media sharing aspects, but it goes far deeper than others shown at DEMO. It's more of an application platform with a replication engine, relational database, a local Web server, a UI presentation layer, APIs for building applications and hosted servers and storage.

Google Gears, in beta, is a browser extension that provides offline access to Web content, but Tubes today has a richer environment.
A Tube is basically a metafile with behaviors, such as access privileges for each subscriber, associated with it that is automatically synchronized bidirectionally, according John Landry, Tube Networks founder, CTO and chairman. In addition, every Tube can be viewed as a Web site and Tubes can be shared among users, who are assigned different roles and privileges, by sending invitations via email via a built in console.
Tubes, which requires 13.5 megabyte Windows (or Parallels) client download, is free with 1 gigabyte of storage. Paid versions start at $5.95 per month for a 5-gigabyte account.
I've known John since his days as CTO of Lotus, where replication was king. The technology for Tubes came out of Adesso Systems, which targeted file synchronization and management software for corporations. Last year, Landry and company refocused the technology toward a more consumer audience.
It not hard to see Tubes as intersecting business and personal usage. You can create Tubes with vacation photos, video, travel plan etc. and share it with family member or share various documents with a workgroup, including those who don't have the Tubes client application. The company is working on embedding Tubes with Facebook.
In addition, Tubes Networks offers developers support for .NET, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, AIR and other technologies. Edmunds.com and Floorplanner.com have integrated with the Tube platform to provide offline access to their hosted applications.