PayPal Founder Debuts Photo Slideshow App

One of the founders of popular online payment site PayPal has launched a new service that could prove useful to those computer users who have vast collections of digital photos on their hard drives.

Called Slide, the program will index photos and then group them into "channels" that are streamed in a ticker tape like interface that sits on the user's desktop. A user can share individual images as well as invite friends to subscribe to a channel to view those images.

Public image channels can also be created that anyone can view. Slide says business partners can use the service to promote their products. Currently, the site counts Gizmodo, Engadget and online meetup site Hot or Not as some of its early partners.

"Slide's elegance and simplicity make it the perfect application for watching and sharing rich media from your hard drive, your friends, and the Web," said Max Levchin, Slide's founder and CEO.

"While you read your e-mail or surf the Web, Slide lets you see and share all those pictures you always knew you had somewhere but never have the time to look at."

While Slide is in beta and only available for Windows at this time, the company says it is actively seeking Apple developers to help produce a compatible version of Slide for Mac OS X.

Levchin was one of the founding partners of PayPal in 1998, handling much of the technological aspect of the site as Chief Technical Officer. Paypal was then acquired by eBay in 2002, and Levchin left the company shortly afterward to persue other interests. In 2004, Silde was founded.