AOL Buys Xdrive

America Online has acquired online storage firm Xdrive as a building block for the company's forthcoming AOL.com Internet site.

In the days before its famous mega-merger with Time-Warner, AOL was famous for buying armloads of small, interesting companies. Now the post-merger lull may be coming to an end: America Online announced today it has acquired online storage firm Xdrive for an undisclosed amount. AOL is expected to integrate Xdrive’s secure online storage technologies into the company’s forthcoming AOL.com Internet site, enabling users to back up data from their desktop computers, as well as store files, music, pictures, video, and other data on AOL.com and access it from any Internet-enabled computer.

Xdrive is AOL’s first major acquisition since it purchased Mailblocks, Inc. and Advertising.com in mid-2004. According to AOL, current and future Xdrive customers will be able to continue using the Xdrive service as specified in their Terms of Service agreements, and Xdrive will operate as a stand-alone, wholly-owned subsidiary at its current Santa Monica location. Xdrive’s 34 employees will now report to AOL’s senior VP of digital services, Gio Hunt.

Xdrive users can access their storage space via operating system which can run a reasonably modern Web browser like Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator 7+, or Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. Xdrive Desktop, which permits access to Xdrive storage directly from a computer’s file system, currently only supports Microsoft Windows.