As slideshow designs go, the Adobe Flash templates are impressive and fairly sophisticated for a free site. Templates range from shutter effects to cartoonish animation, all of which are quality visuals. One disconnect, however, is on the customization page for creating and saving a slideshow, where thumbnails of "show themes" are displayed. The thumbnails themselves appear as miserable-looking, stock graphic art (bitmapped at that)—while the actual application of each thumbnail as a slideshow effect is actually quite good. If you didn't actually stop to experiment, you'd never know.

Once saved, the completed show can be uploaded with the click of a few buttons to networking sites such as MySpace, hi5.com, and Facebook; blogs such as MySpace Blog, Xanga, Yahoo 360, Blogger, TypePad, and Wretch; and even eBay, allowing sellers to display and cross-sell products for sale. Additional distribution choices allow you to email to friends, create your own screensaver, or create a partial version of the show for personal profiles within nine different sites such as GeoCities or LiveJournal.

Privacy options are available; a slideshow creator can permit his or her final masterpiece to be openly accessible or invitation-only. HTML code for the script can also be copied and pasted into any personal or business website as well.

A downloadable Slide Player is available for PC and Mac desktop use to both display and create more shows.

While some believe everything on the Internet should be shared as one giant collective, free for the taking, there are others concerned with copyrights and protection from a free-for-all. Slide seems to fall more in the former category, offering a feature called a "bookmarklet" which acts as an "image scraper," allowing anyone to create a slideshow out of images from virtually any website. Translation: unless photos are digitally rights-protected and locked within a site, any Slide user can take them and do as he pleases within his own slideshow—as well as broadcast the show to anyone else.

Lest you think only teens are using the site, businesses are leaving their own mark including Apple iTunes, WireImage, Audible.com and online retailers Blue Nile and Zappos.com by creating their own self-promoting slideshows for general viewing. However, considering Slide has been around for two years now, there are remarkably few business partnerships aside from Slide's partnership with eBay. And why anyone would want a slideshow of Zappos shoes without size, price, or even direct URL links is also questionable.

The company, founded by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, is lead by veterans of eBay, PayPal, Adobe, and Openwave. According to the company, "Slide delivers digital content from any source directly to you according to your interests: images, text and video created by you or your friends, the web's top news and entertainment sources, the blogosphere and the most popular online merchants. Slide helps cut through the clutter so you can know more, do more and be more connected—all while you search less and wander less."

As high reaching as the company's claims seem, what is actually available so far falls well short of its promised offer.