Oosah, a company that offers Web 2.0 hosting solutions, announced Thursday that it has launched a new widget design tool that will allow any user to easily create customizable and embeddable rich-media widgets with images, videos, and status updates from popular social-networking platforms, Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace, and Flickr.
"Consumers are increasingly using the Internet as their platform of choice for viewing and sharing media with their families, friends, business associates, and customers," said Dan Khasis, Oosah co-founder and chief technical officer. "We felt that what was needed now was a way to make it simpler for users to collect and share content from popular Web sites. Our new Oosahs capability addresses this need."
Regardless of whether users sign up for an Oosah account, they can create and share their content from their favorite sites through a single widget. According to the company, that widget can be embedded in any site and can even be linked to or shared through a unique link or by e-mailing it to others.
To create the widget, users need to follow three steps. First, they need to select a site to aggregate content from and choose the type of content it is. In other words, if the users are pulling the gallery of pictures from Twitter followers, they can assign that to the "Media Gallery" designation and the widget will respond by preparing the widget to display images. Finally, users can pick a feed they want the widget to work with and personalize the Oosah widgets by selecting a color scheme.
Although creating widgets doesn't require an Oosah account, the company did say that Oosah members will be able to create widgets with all the pictures, videos, and music already being hosted in a user's personal Oosah account.
Oosah is a solid Flash-based media manager that lets you create little slide shows and share pictures with your friends. It competes with some pretty good applications, such as Flektor, Slide, and Splashcast, though, and isn't likely to rocket to superstardom as just another media destination site.
But a new feature, being introduced today, takes Oosah to a whole different place: It lets you drag images between your PC and online accounts, such as Flickr and Facebook, or even directly between your online accounts, avoiding your PC and your Oosah storage allotment. That's not just new and cool, it's very useful. I plan to use this feature to drag images between my private Picasa Web and public Flickr profiles when needed, and ignore the whole cutesy slide show feature.
Oosah lets you transfer media and entire folders between your online accounts.
(Credit: Oosah)The first services supported by this feature will be Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook. MySpace is coming soon, Michael Duggan, Oosah's chief operating officer, told me. The service will also let you drag videos to YouTube. I strongly doubt you'll be able to drag videos off YouTube to other services.
If you tag images in any of the services, the tags go with the media when they're dragged to other services. User comments, however, don't make the transition.
You can also import images from a Web page just by providing the URL. The service then gathers up the images for you.
Oosah is not a PC-to-Web synchronization tool. It can't monitor your local picture folders and automatically upload new images to the Web. (See SugarSync; BlueString)
Oosah's 2GB accounts are free. There are no premium plans yet with more storage. But files you manage on other services do not count toward your total, so it doesn't really matter. Try this one while you can, since the company's revenue plan--"Right now, we're not focused on making money"--doesn't bode well for its future, no matter how cool it is.
See also: Joggle.
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