Exclusive: review of Slide beta

Yet another player is about to join Flickr, Smugmug and the countless other file-sharing services chasing digital photographers. Slide, a 12-person company headed by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is expected to open its doors on Monday, according to News.com. I got an early peek at the service this weekend, and found it to be easy to use, though its channels metaphor isn't nearly as transparent as Flickr's photostreams. For one thing, you have to subscribe to channels before you can look at the images inside, and once you've subscribed, you still have to use the downloadable Slide program to view the actual images. That downloadable app (currently only for Windows 2000 and XP), is at the heart of Slide, and is what distinguishes it most from other photo-sharing serivices.



The program automatically indexes all images on your hard drive for easy uploads, and also acts as a front end to allow you to browse your subscribed channels. By default, Slide installs itself as a startup program, running automatically every time you log in to your computer. There's no obvious way to disable this, though Microsoft Anti-Spyware warns you about it and gives you the option to do so. The program uses a "ticker," which displays humbnails from subscribed channels in a scrolling bar down the right side of your screen. You can pause or stop the ticker, and hovering over an thumbnail with your mouse automatically displays a larger version. You can then save this larger version to your hard drive, email it to a friend, or display a full-size version in your browser. You can create private channels in addition to public ones, and can invite friends to view your private channels. You can also use slide to browse local photos on your hard drive, which open full-size in your default image viewing app.

In addition to member-generated content, Slide will include commercial channels from sponsors such as Zappos and Bluefly, which is apparently how the service will generate revenue.

Overall, I found Slide relatively easy to use, though I'm not that fond of having to use a downloadable app to access the service. If you're used to flickr's interface — not to mention its open API — you're likely to find the service a little too limited for now. However, the service already allows sharing of videos, music and just about any other kind of digital files, making it more of a general purpose P2P community (though, for now at least, the focus is clearly on photos). Some beta users have already uploaded music files, which can be downloaded and played in your default music player.

Slide is definitely worth a try, and is likely to improve based on user feedback. However, in its current form, it's unlikely to win over too many dedicated flickr users, and dedicated file-sharers may find it a little too limited compared to other apps.

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