News

posted on 27 February 2008 09:00

ISP AOL has launched a storage-in-the-cloud service offering 5GB to each user.

It is provided through its Xdrive subsidiary and is called Xdrive Desktop Lite. AOL is thus competing with Microsoft and its Live service as well as Google by offering free online storage.

The Xdrive is available to both Windows and Mac OS users and its software uses the new Adobe AIR product. Currently, anyone with a free AOL or AIM screen name can register for Xdrive for free. Later this year, consumers will be able to use Xdrive with any screen name or email address. Upgrades to 50GB accounts are available for $9.95 per month. 

Xdrive is a Verisign Secure Site, and provides password protection for all sessions and stored assets.  AOL claims that Xdrive's high volume network and horizontally scalable processor complex provide the performance and reliability that consumers demand.

Users treat the Xdrive as just another disk and users uploading digital files stored on a local hard drive will be able to see the contents of that drive appear within the Xdrive application. They can drag the files from the local drive to the Xdrive service in one step.

Kevin Conroy, an AOL EVP, said: “AOL has long been a leader in the online storage space, and we continue to enhance Xdrive to ensure that we are providing the best solution for consumers to store, manage and share all of their digital files online for free"

An AOL SVP, David Liu, said: "By deploying this application on Adobe AIR, we have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes to upload a file, and implemented simple drag-and-drop technology to ensure that people can easily transfer their files to Xdrive no matter where they reside originally – on the desktop, a hard drive or even a camera’s memory card.”

The Xdrive Desktop Lite application has been built using publicly-available APIs featured on dev.aol.com, which offers developers and partners the opportunity to create a series of applications compatible with the Xdrive storage system. 

For example, BlueString, an  online destination allowing people to combine photos, videos and music to create multimedia shows, was built using these APIs and released into beta in September by AOL.