Techno WeBlog

AOL is launched a new collaborative multimedia story telling service called BlueString. The site ,is a Flex application that lets you pull in all your image, video, and audio content from across the web and mix them together into a multimedia slide show presentation. The shows can be embedded, shared, and edited by your friends.

BlueString’s neat trick is that it manages to work well as both a sharing site–a good place for you to create slide shows of events that you then e-mail to your family or embed on your personal site–and a media storage service.

For starters, BlueString provides five free gigabytes of storage for video, photo, and music files. For $100 a year you’ll get 50GB, and that storage cap will be raised shortly. The storage back-end for BlueString is XDrive, an online storage and backup service that AOL acquired, and where AOL has clearly been testing BlueString ideas. BlueString’s show creator function, for example, looks like a rebuild of a nearly identical feature in XDrive.

BlueString is Flash-based, and an AIR-based version of it that can live outside the browser is also in the works.

This looks like a very good media-sharing app for real people, and a decent backup app as well. XDrive is a good foundation for the product, but it looks like the BlueString user interface will be a bit more inviting.

One more thing: BlueString will not require an AOL screen name. If you have one you can use it, but you can also use whatever e-mail address you want as your ID. This feature is called “open namespace” and is relatively new.

Filed under: Web