Microsoft said that it has officially started offering five gigabytes of free online storage through its SkyDrive service in South Korea.

The service is a virtual hard drive on the Web and users can use it to share files with other Windows Live users.

The SkyDrive files can store some 1,000 songs or 30,000 digital photos, and members can create up to 30 top-level folders and unlimited subfolders, which are likely to be designated as personal or shared.

Officials say SkyDrive provides users with three options ― safe files, files to be shared with friends and files available to anyone on the Web. Files can only be shared with other Windows Live ID users, who can be designated as ``readers’’ with no file modification.

The service works on Windows and Internet Explorer 6 or higher.

A very cool idea for sure. It's a good thing that Microsoft is taking the iniative to get these kind of services off the ground because Google is certainly gaining ground on them in this sense. I would definitely make use of this after it's been established for a little longer and security is ensured.