• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 26, 2007

In a better-late-than-never move, AOL plans to officially launch its own video-sharing site, AOL Uncut, this summer.

The service, which has been available in beta for nearly a year, is powered by technology from VideoEgg and, like YouTube, allows users to rate, tag and comment on uploaded videos. Clips are 5 minutes compared to YouTube’s 10-minute limit. Not surprisingly, the site has a similar, if more polished, look and feel toYouTube.

The upcoming debut of AOL UnCut follows closely the launch of AIMPages, AOL’s answer to MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. While Yahoo has snapped up social networking properties like Flickr and JumpCut, AOL has mostly worked on building its own social media features in-house. Either way, both portals are trying to jump onto social media trends begun by Web 2.0 upstarts with a fraction of their resources.

It’s especially ironic that AOL, which popularized the use of e-mail and instant messaging, finds itself playing catch-up in the realm of online media and communication.