As has been previously reported, AOL is shutting down its photo-hosting services AOL Pictures and Bluestring, and its online file storage service Xdrive. Everything stored there goes away on December 31, 2008. Photos on AOL Pictures are getting an optional new home at American Greetings' PhotoWorks service, although users have to actively sign on to the new service before June 30, 2009, to rescue their images.
Out.
The best bet, for everyone, is to sign on to your AOL services before the end of the year and download your photos or files. All three services will have bulk downloading available until the end of the year; archival DVDs will also be available for a fee. Xdrive users will also find other online storage companies hustling for their business.
In.
The selection of PhotoWorks as the sole online destination for users' files is limiting. When Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos to favor its Flickr service, it offered users not just a sideload to Flickr but to Shutterfly or Kodak Gallery if they wished. PhotoWorks isn't a bad photo site, but it's not the most contemporary in terms of features, and as it is part of American Greetings, the service is definitely canted toward the creation of printed photo gift items. However, American Greetings' GM of Digital Photography, Sally Babcock, told me that to sweeten the deal, "we are offering customers 50 free prints to migrate and may have some other special offers closer to the holidays."
Users of Xdrive's paid services will get a pro-rated refund early in 2009; billing itself will stop as of November 5, 2008.
Regarding the shutdown, AOL said in a statement: "Although these services have been an important part of our product portfolio for many years, AOL's shift to a Web-based, advertising-focused company has caused us to take a close look at the products we offer and we determined that managing and maintaining these hosted and subscription-based services is not in the best long-term interest of our users or our business."
AOL's new AIR-based XDrive front-end is simple, but universal.
At CES, AOL was showing new features in its media-sharing service, BlueString (see hands-on). The latest news is the release of a Facebook app, My Memory Gallery, that lets you share your pictures with your Facebook pals. It's a nice bow to AOL's realization that, "We need to be where people actually are," as a representative told me. In my quick tryout of the application, though, I found no way to move files from preexisting BlueString folders into the Gallery folder so they'd show up on the Facebook widget. That kind of burst my bubble.
I also checked out a new version of XDrive, whose technology is at the core of BlueString. The new AIR-based XDrive UI, called Oxygen, is scheduled to drop in February. It will be a much simpler application than the current C-based app, and represents the future of the XDrive Web site as well. AOL will eventually phase out the Windows-based XDrive user interface, although at the moment it does things an AIR app cannot, such as automated file backup.
Users can access their files XDrive files from BlueString and vice versa, but the products are designed for different audiences and have different features. BlueString, designed for the "female head of household," recognizes only media files and gives you fancy slide show and sharing functions. The older XDrive brand represents a more technical product with better file management features, and while the interface will work with any and all file types, it doesn't have the same presentation features.
I'd rather have just one app that can do it all, but AOL's marketing geniuses clearly see a value in different interfaces and features for different demographics. (I'd also like to see an unlimited storage option instead of the 50GB space you get for $99 a year with both products.)
XDrive, ultimately, competes with upstart online file stores (Box.net, for example), live backup apps like Carbonite, and even raw storage services like Amazon's S3. The XDrive product was going downhill in the period before and after AOL bought it in 2005. It's good to see some resources finally being applied to the service.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
AOL is showing off today a new media sharing and storage service, BlueString. I snuck into the unfinished product after I got a preview, and it looks like it's going to be very straightforward and easy to use. There are several services that do what it does, but few that do it as easily.
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.
BlueString is a good media storage service, and it also makes it very easy to create slideshows for friends and family.
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.
Getting media into BlueString is quite easy. The import dialog box allows you to select multiple files to import at once. If you're a user of AOL Pictures, files from there also automatically load into your workspace. These features are being showcased today at the TechCrunch 40 event in San Francisco. BlueString will also import from Flickr, which is great for people who miss the straightforward Yahoo Photos application recently killed in favor of the higher-concept Flickr service.
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