When we pushed our latest BlueString release to market last week, which included the aggregation sites, we also introduced a new accessory called Face to Face.

Face to Face is a downloadable software tool using the latest facial recognition technology that automatically detects and then tags faces to help you quickly and easily organize your photos. Once you label a picture of, say, your Mom, it will help you find all of those other pictures of Mom. And it gets better and smarter the more pictures of Mom that you tag. Now when you have a whole camera full of pictures from the holidays, it's a snap to get them organized.

Once tagged, within the software, you can also search the images for people that are important to you -- your friends, your family, your team mates, your co-workers, your classmates, and so on. After your photos have been tagged, you can then upload those photos organized by person into corresponding folders on BlueString.

To use Face to Face on your PC, just go to BlueString and click on the Accessories link at the bottom of the page. Run the installer and you're ready to go.

Just another exciting new feature that we've added to BlueString!

Following on our announcement during the Web 2.0 Conference, we launched our aggregation capabilities into production earlier this week. Many thanks and congratulations to our Developers, QA and Operations teams for building and launching this fantastic capability. And our appreciation to Webshots, Google and Photobucket for their support.

So now you can include your favorite pictures from Webshots, Picasa Web or Photobucket right into your BlueString Shows - with no need to re-upload those same images to BlueString itself.

And once you create your Shows, whether you are using media from BlueString or from any of our aggregation sites, you can then share them with your friends and family.

Better yet, click on the String It tab as you share to let your friends and family add their own images to the same Show. Tell the story of your family reunion with everyone's pictures -- it's a lot more fun! When you put in your friends' or family's e-mail addresses in the String It tab, they will receive an e-mail inviting them to watch the Show and add their own stuff to the Show as well. They can, of course, upload their own images, videos or music to BlueString, or they can include photos that they have already stored on any of our aggregation partners' sites.

So go ahead, start a String It conversation!

Today, we announced aggregation partnerships with some of the web's largest media sites, including Photobucket, Picasa and Webshots, which I alluded to in the last post. And there will be more to come of these aggregation sites in the near future. We are really excited about working with these sites since they will open up new sources of digital media to BlueString users. Plus, they have all been great partners to work with!

You can read the entire release here.

In our next product release (coming very soon), BlueString users will be able to access videos and images that they have already stored on these sites directly from BlueString. So you will be able include photos from all of these sites in your BlueString shows and creations -- no need to upload them again to BlueString. Our goal is to make it a snap for users to create multimedia shows that they can then share and talk about with anyone - their friends, family, school mates, etc.

As quoted in the release today, "By integrating some of the best third party sites on the Web into BlueString, we are making it easy for consumers to use this application no matter where they store their digital media."

We also announced our partnership with Eye Fi. WIth Eye Fi, users can use their home wi-fi network to send photos right from their digital camera to their BlueString account. Now you don't even have to plug in your camera to preserve and share your latest pictures. Eye Fi is doing this using the OpenXdrive APIs. Xdrive, our sister product, powers the storage behind BlueString.

Finally, we're at Web 2.0 this week, so come visit us. We can be found at the AOL Developer Network booth, as well as at the Photobucket booth. We're giving sneak peeks of the aggregation capabilities soon to be available in BlueString. Eye Fi is with us at the AOL booth showing off their eye fi cards as well.

Hi everyone!

We will be showing off some new features at the Web 2.0 Expo next week (April 22-25) in San Francisco, so come visit us at the AOL Developer Network booth.

While there, we will be doing demos of some new functionality that we will be launching shortly after the show. Specifically, we will be highlighting our aggregation capabilities with some other poplular media sites, as well as some other things we have been working on. Stay tuned for specific aggregation partners...

With aggregation, you can include media that you have already uploaded to these other sites in your BlueString shows, so that you don't have to re-upload them to BlueString. It can't get any easier to create and share a multimedia show with ALL of your media files!

But the power of aggregation really comes in with our String It functionality. We will address String It in more depth in an upcoming post, because we have gotten lots of questions about that. But, in short, String It let's the people you share with add more content to your show, so that you and your friends (or family) can tell the full story and experience your memories in a more enriching way.

Let's use an example. You and your best friend go to a party. You take some great pictures and video that you upload through BlueString. But your friend has an account with another photo service, and she uploads her pictures there. So you create a great multimedia show from the party -- you've got your pictures, a video clip, more pictures and so on. You String It to your friend. She views it within BlueString and wants to add some of her shots as well. Instead of having to switch services and re-upload all of those images that she has on the other service, she can just select those images from that service right within BlueString and add them directly into the show.

Now your show from the party includes your great video pix and your friend's great pictures. And you can both tell the story and relive the fun together!

We'll be doing some fun demos of this functionality next week, so we hope you'll stop by to check it out.

Thanks to everyone who has been using BlueString during our beta period. We've received great feedback from our beta users, as well as some incredible suggestions for improvements and new feature sets.

We will be at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week, the week of January 7th, where we will be previewing some new features for BlueString, Xdrive and extending BlueString functionality to some popular internet destinations. Or, come visit us in the AOL booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center!

Hi! And welcome to BlueString, a new site where you can preserve and share your memories in a whole new way. Our goal is to provide a product that enables you to enrich your relationships with those your care about -- your friends, your family, your own communities. We'll start with letting you tell your stories with more than just photos. You can use mutliple media types! But this is just the beginning and we have some exciting things planned for the future.

We welcome you to come in and check it out -- you can upload your photos, videos and music and then you can create unique multimedia slides shows using your digital media. And we have sharing that puts you in control, from private sharing to publishing.

We are in an open beta right now and we welcome comments and feedback on your experience with BlueString. BlueString is for you, so we appreciate your suggestions to help us improve and bring you the features you need and want

Stay tuned for information on new releases, from new capabilities allowing you to access your media from across the web, to express and create with your digital media, and to share in exciting new ways. For now, take a tour of some of our features at https://www.bluestring.com/tour.jsp or just go to www.bluestring.com and give it a try.