Intro: BlueString is AOL’s new attempt to build a website attracting users wanting to store, organize and share multimedia online. The official tagline: “The easy way to create and share your memories using…  Your photos. Your videos. Your music.”

Exec Sum: Bluestring provides an intuitive interface and is inspired by some creative touches, but it falls short for anyone looking beyond a basic way to share a few collections of photos with a varying list of people, and isn’t flexible enough to work with large or customized collections of stuff.

My tenminut.es: Signing up is not encouraging: If you have an AOL account you can use it, but you’ll still be asked for a “little more info to get started!” (Always get nervous if you see exclamation points before a form you’re being asked to fill out.) This one is particularly intrusive: First Name, Last Name, Street Address, City, State (US only, bizarrely), Zip and Phone:

(You can get around this if you have an account at Xdrive, their existing online storage service.)

The site itself is Flash-based, so it’s interactive and quite intuitive. Your collection is split into five: documents, music, photos, playlists and videos. Uploading is easy and intuitive, allowing multiple selections, but is let down by a confusing progress bar which for me got stuck after two uploads, and needed tweaking to run again:

Once the photos are uploaded you can preview them, email them to others, share them or download them. I was disappointed, however, to find that some of the photos came up blank when I tried to preview them:

I also noticed that recipients of emails from a BlueString user would see the thumbnail of the photo(s) they’ve been asked to view as reshaped as squares, making them look weird (the linked photo is fine):

Rafe Needleman says in his review on Webware that it’ll be possible to import from Flickr (that’ll be interesting, particularly whether the tags and other information are also imported.)

For now, you can import any files you may have on AOL, and a Windows only installer can automatically upload anything in your My Music, My Pictures and My Videos folder into BlueString. The installer itself allows you to choose which of the three you want, but not which subfolders, or to select other folders if you don’t use those default Windows folders as the place to store your media.

Furthermore, the software itself does not appear initially in the system tray if you launch it from the Start Menu, and indeed doesn’t appear in the application list. It can only be found among the processes, and not named as a variation on BlueString but as Xdrive:

(Later it does appear in the system tray as a BlueString application, but, in another black mark, doesn’t offer an option in the right click menu to shut down the application. That can only be done from the Windows Task Manager:)

And, it probably goes without saying, you’re not given an option as to whether you want the device to start up with Windows. It’s already registered in your boot sequence. In fact, twice:

And there’s nothing in the application itself to switch this off, if, say, you’re on a slow connection or in a hurry.

This, I admit, makes sense in that the application is designed as a fire-and-forget, sync everything application, but nevertheless, user confidence needs to be won, not taken for granted.

It’s too early, really, to tell whether this is going to be more than a toy. At its best it could be a good bridge between your local files and those online (without the backwards synchronization, of course.)

Verdict: AOL have dented their reputation in this space because of complaints about service with Xdrive. Which is why I think they need to reduce the intrusiveness of the information-gathering process and the sync software, and make the rest of BlueString really sing. BlueString, however, may well fill a hole of sharing your photos with a select group of people. And 5GB of free stuff is pretty generous, assuming you don’t have much music or videos to upload.

Score: 5 out of 10