Oosah, the company that offers a 1 TB storage capacity for free to all users, is releasing today a new set of tools. Oosah’s primary concept is to create a place to manage our online hosted files (from Youtube, Facebook, Flickr…) in a desktop-like environment.
Instead of focusing on file syndication, Oosah’s new release focuses on content distribution.
Now, consumers will be able to show their favorite content from major sites and consolidate it into a single, linkable, shareable, embeddable widget without having to create an Oosah account. Oosahs can be embedded into blogs, websites, social networking pages, or e-mailed to friends.
I found this news to be interesting, so I went to Oosah.com and created a few widgets.
Youtube widget
I just wrote the name of my channel in a box, and selected which specific feed I want to appear in the slideshow, along with widget size and default color. Interestingly enough, you can also create a widget with the feed from your Twitter account. I am not really sure about the value that this might add, as the pics tapped in Twitter are low-rez, and the tweets embedded are totally out of context
Craigslists widget
The most interesting widget to my opinion is the Craigslist feed widget. Select any feed from the Craigslist classifieds, paste it on your Oosah widget creation page, and the all the items from the feed will appear on your widget
I really like the tools that oosah has to offer. There are quite a few downsides to the story though, which I hope the development team will fix. First, any of the widgets created above are not manageable. They are read-only, so if you just want to change the border color, you have to go through the widget creation process all over again (which is too bad because they have storage room).
I don’t quite see the point of the Twitter widget. Add a dialog box to interact with the users in the widget, and I’ll start to see opportunities.
Whatever feed I request for the Youtube widget, it serves me the same videos. Mmm, why oh why?
Regarding the Craigslist widget, the pictures should be processed and re-sized before being re-distributed in the widget. The products appearing in the widget have a severe case of pixelache.
The best for Oosah would be to make the widget creation wizard more flexible. As a content publisher, I feel frustrated by all the limits I come across when creating a widget. I don’t think Web users adopt a product because it has such and such tools integrated; I think we adopt a product because we can customize it to make it our own personal identifiable item. I look forward to find more of this on Oosah.