AOL recently soft-launched their new video social networking community, AOL UnCut, this week. The official launch is set for the end of June/beginning of July.

I tried it out and was moderately impressed. You can upload videos of up to five minutes in length, which get converted into their Flash 8 compression settings. The compression settings are slightly better than YouTube's. The site also shares similar features such as rating videos, commenting, embedding the player into your own blog as well as your AOL journal, and adding videos to your favorites list. There is also an AOL IM feature that seems pretty cool, but didn't work on my system.

It doesn't work with Mac versions of Firefox, but it does with Safari. There is currently no search support, RSS support, or tagging, but it seems to be in the works for Beta 2. They have also partnered with VideoEgg to offer mobile device uploads to the site soon. Rumor is that they'll also be adding online video editing tools in the near future.

Before you join, you may want to take a quick peek at their terms of service and make sure you're okay with them. Basically anything you upload can be re-edited and re-used for AOL commericial purposes. You also have to be over 18 years of age. This community tool seems to be fine for the casual at-home user sharing videos with friends and family, but not at all sufficient for the serious videoblogger who wants full control of content, compression, and copyright.