I tried out the Slide photo sharing service this afternoon. I understand it's a beta, but as we've seen from many other services... beta doesn't have to be unusable.

Here's why I didn't like Slide:- It requires a download. Hey, my Grandpa isn't going to download and install something. In contrast, with Flickr, I can just point him to a Web page, and voila, he sees my photos.

- It didn't find any of my photos. Okay, they're in c:pics, but I've redefined that folder as the place where my pictures are and other apps have had no problems finding it.

- It's slow. Even on my Pentium 4 3.0ghz machine with 2 gigs of RAM.

- It's unintuitive. Some operations you do from the panel, some from the app settings page, some from the Web page. Blech.

- It doesn't even seem to work very well. I tried adding both an RSS and an Atom feed from Flickr and didn't get any photos shown at all.

- The UI is just lousy. Mouseovers, selections, it's all mished together making it too easy to select something when you're just moving the mouse and too difficult to close a Slide window.

* * *

I look forward to the day when someone (Flickr / Flickr-devs? makes an Ajaxian app that allows one to easily add photos to groups, share them with different sets of friends, complete with a neat scroll-y thing across the top of their screen.

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