All-In-One Online Destination Offers a Single Location to Preserve, Access and Share Photos, Videos and Music for Free…
Dulles, Va. — A day after announcing plans to relocate its headquarters to New York, AOL on Tuesday announced the availability of a beta version of BlueString, the first free Website that enables users to easily upload, store, manage, create and share all of their digital media – photos, videos and music – stored on sites across the Web.
The new site, Bluestring, combines elements of video- sharing sites such as Google Inc’s YouTube, online picture sites such as Yahoo Inc’s Flickr service and music sites with AOL’s online storage division Xdrive.
“For the first time, we are making it possible for people to access, combine and share all of their personal media from a single application for free,” Kevin Conroy, executive vice president of AOL, said in a statement on Monday.
BlueString provides the ability to manually or automatically upload photos, videos and music and easily create rich multimedia shows to share with family and friends.
“BlueString offers a simple, one-stop solution for personal media storage and management,” Conroy said. An innovative feature called “String it” makes it easy to collaborate, allowing several members of the service to add assets to one show and upload media too them, much like the “Sets” and “Groups” work on Flickr.
BlueString offers up to 5GB of free online storage and beginning this fall, will give users the ability to link directly to video clips and photos from a number of leading third party media sharing sites without having to upload or move them to BlueString, AOL said. During the test, the company said it would allow users to connect to their Flickr accounts.
AOL plans to let users connect to more services, possibly including YouTube, down the line, said AOL Senior Vice President David Liu. “Aggregation is part of our core strategy,” Liu said.
“With the free version, depending on file size, users would be able to upload about 1,600 songs, 10,000 photos, or about 600 videos. The site would replace its AOL Pictures offering when it goes live officially sometime next year.”
If users need more space, a premium option giving 50GB of space would be available for $99 per year.
Any user with an active email address from any provider can easily register to use this product for free.
BlueString lets users easily Access and Share their media:
- Access their media from anywhere: BlueString offers a single point of access to photos, videos and music through a single application.
- Share their media privately: BlueString allows users to invite private groups of friends and family to view their personal media collection or even embed their media on a Website or blog.
- “String It”: Users can express themselves through their personal media by creating a show and inviting others to add their own photos, videos or music to it, while maintaining the level of access recipients have to edit or add to a specific show.
- Multi-User Accessibility: Multiple users can string together photos or videos from an event taken over time to create a lasting memory. Strings can be updated easily and changed as new photos or videos are captured.
The application itself is powered by Xdrive, the storage company that AOL bought in August 2005. In June of this year, the company made APIs of Xdrive available to developers so that they could use its storage capabilities in their own applications.
“The first Beta release of BlueString is available at www.BlueString.com.”