USB flash drive usefulness?

I own a 2 GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro. The sheer fact that it is so ridiculously small, and has more storage than many of the computers that I’ve owned (and probably more processing power) gives it a pretty high geek factor. But what the heck can you do with these things that’s really useful?

Using it as just storage seems silly. There is so much free online storage now, and networks are so ubiquitous that using a flash drive solely as storage seems silly. You can get 5 gigs of free online storage at box.net. There are many other similar free storage services, as well as for-pay services that offer huge storage capacities, and there’s even Amazon S3 if you want to take it to extremes.

About the most useful thing I’ve done with mine lately is to use it as a backup disk with Apple Backup. Even that will seem a little silly very shortly, since I just ordered a new Airport Extreme, and I have an external 250 GB USB 2.0 drive sitting at home waiting to be used as network storage. I won’t even have to plug anything into my laptop to have it backed up, it will just happen automagically every night.

My collegue Jim, an IT ninja, says that he would use it to boot TinyLinux for some IT support tasks. He’s the first person I’ve actually known that actually would do this, and it’s probably one of the most viable uses I can think of.

Yeah, there are portable apps for OS X, Linux, and Windows, but how many people really use them beyond the initial geek coolness factor of saying you have FireFox on your keychain?

Vista lets you use a flash drive to “improve system performance”, presumably by using it as cache, swap, or hibernate storage (or all of the above). But soon, that’ll just be integrated into everyone’s laptop. Now, If I could have a complete operating system and my currently saved workspace all on a flash drive that gave me instant-on-and-resume-my-workspace on any machine, that might be useful.

But, unfortunately, that doesn’t exists, and I can’t come up with anything really useful to do with mine. I think the days of the USB flash drive are numbered.