In their own words BlueString™ Personal Multimedia Service is a platform for "preserving, mixing and sharing personal digital media files." The interesting part of all that is "mixing" as there are already a multitude of photo sharing services out there, including AOL® Pictures. Bluestring claims to be an "experience" sharing service where you can easily create "shows" from your collection of photos, videos, and music.
I took a pass at making a show from a series of pictures. I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised at the ease in which I could create a show from a series of pictures. Everything is drag-and-drop and works pretty much as you would expect. I created the following show in about 10 seconds (you have click the play button - an autostart feature would be nice:) ). I didn't have any music handy, but a "soundtrack" can also be easily added to the show.
After creating a show, you can send it to your friends or export it as a flash object. There is even a cool feature called "string it" where you can have your friends add their media to your show - definitely a nice collaborative aspect.
The concept is elegant and clearly a step beyond the current web-based photo sharing tools that are out there. It's still in Beta so I'm sure more features are on the way. I'd like to see more slide transitions and a bit better integration of AOL Pictures. My only concerns are in regard to the obvious use of the Xdrive. While using Xdrive as a back-end service is a no-brainer in terms of architecture, I think it's a bit too transparent to the user - upon login you see all your Xdrive folders. For a user like myself who has a lot of non-media content stored in Xdrive, this only serves to clutter up my Bluestring home page. I've always found that the best tools are those where the technology is not apparent.