Slashdot Mirror
Glide Effortless to Compete in File Sharing Market
Dotnaught writes "InformationWeek is running a story about a new consumer application suite called Glide Effortless that's slated to be released in mid-November. Think of it as iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iCal, Mail, document sharing, shopping, and a few other apps all in one seamless application hosted as a service on the Web that could be accessed by any browser on any computer. It allows file sharing without the risk of illegal copying. It might prove a viable competitor to iTunes, if it works as advertised and if it can scale to handle millions of users."
... as I glide effortlessly to fp! Suck it!
I prefer to store data on my own computer, for privacy reasons. I will not use these services for sensitive, private data, because I do not know who else has access to said data. And I see no point in using their service only for non-sensitive needs, while returning to my existing solutions for private matters.
I doubt their service offers anything beyond what is already possible with a solid Linux or BSD setup, while costing far more and lacking the security I've come to expect.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Is this the sort of thing anyone in the /. community would use? I don't mean to troll, but aren't there already a million and a half applications that people are already familiar with / already have installed that could do the exact same thing(s)?
This isn't the days of Hotline anymore. (Though it did pwn for its time... Ahh, the power of dc++)
Link: Glide Effortless
Seems like they're planning one gargantuan Flash site to run it all, judging by their current introductory site and the "flashy" screenshots of their upcoming one.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'
Will run on any browser, phone, mobile device, set top box.. and will do everything office, itunes, windows etc does... and magically solves music piracy on the sidelines by magically knowing what's legal and what's not.
Same old story... Noname company comes out of nowhere, claims their product will cure cancer, end hunger and guarantee world peace all in one go. I call 'bullshit', until presented with real proof of the claims laid out.
You know, that would work far better than a Slashdot-posted joke should...
From TFA:
The software, disclosed in mid-October, is called Glide Effortless. It's a set of 12 applications for content creation, communication, E-commerce, and sharing. The apps are Glide Photos, Glide Music, Glide Video, Glide Docs, Glide AllMedia, Glide Contacts, Glide Calendar, Glide Timeline (Glide's search engine), Glide Mail, Glide Cast (audio, text, and video conferencing), Glide Share, and Glide Shops.
Sounds like a "jack of all trades, master of none" situation here. Purely speculative, of course, but these individual apps would take quite a long while to polish to the level of their competitors, requiring a huge staff that a start-up just wouldn't have. It would be nice to have an all-in-one, platform-agnostic, Web-accessible solution, but it reminds me too much of those multi-function printers and mobile devices where the sum is less than its parts.
There's also the Google Mail syndrome, where people don't get on board en masse because they already have a Yahoo/MSN/whatever email address. Not only does the Glide suite have to be compelling, it has to make the user say "I need the whole thing" in the face of him or her already possessing individual programs they're already familiar with and are paying for. If I were TransMedia, I would have released demo versions of their individual apps, rather than cramming everything into one high-profile release. I think that's just asking for trouble.
Promises are cheap. Slashvertising must be cheap too.
.Mac/Google's offerings so- anything new to see here?
Do these people have any track record? It's a startup? So I guess not.
Why is this making news before it comes out?
All I'm reading here are big promises on a product that a cross between
Oh wait....
From TFA:
"Not only is TransMedia selling Glide to end users, it's also licensing the software to media companies [b]so they can sell it as a branded service.[/b ] As a result, companies like Comcast, Disney, SBC, and Verizon will have the opportunity to offer an integrated, monetizable service that, at first glance, look significantly more compelling than the offerings from Internet portals like AOL and Internet software services like MySpace.com."
Gee, what I wanted, along with those Disney and eBay branded credit cards I don't have nor want.... just the corporations I trust with my personal info.
Simply because you have all these features does not necessarily mean that you're going to be a successful competitor against products like iTunes. iTunes has been marketed so well that it has become almost synonymous with online music shopping. Without support of the major labels and strong advertising companies you simply will not be successful against a product like iTunes in the mainstream market. Furthermore, many people use iTunes as a simple player and therefore when they do feel the need to shop online for music it's just so easy for them to do so through the iTunes interface.
Also, it seems that they're striving to have a lot of features however many sites that do this do indeed come out with many features however they don't perform any of those features exceptionally well. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but a startup company boasting this many features doesn't exactly give me a lot of confidence in the quality of all these services. This service, from what I can see, is also only available in a subscription based service model which quite frankly the majority of this market is not interested in. Their free plan also only comes with 50MB of space which is not going to persuade people to yet again switch service providers.
Most of the features they're boasting are also fairly standard and people are not going to switch to a new service unless it offers significant benefits. For example, why would I switch to use this email service when they only give me 50MB of space and other free services give me 50 times that amount? Switching these services is also a pain in the ass for myself and everyone who communicates with me.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Storing all of your private data on a stranger's computer for a fee, remotely accessible, granting permission to scan everything you have (so clearly it's only so private to begin with, right?) for allegedly copyrighted material (who knows how they know if it's copyrighted by YOU or someone else or if you're allowed to use it or if it's just a PHOTO of Metallica when you saw them backstage)...
Hell, what could possibly go wrong?!
Some things work well being able to be accessed online (Mail and schedules are the best examples I can think of.)
I feel that alot of the service components are going to go to waste with underuse.
The era of the laptop doesn't combine well with the all-online paradigm. The most successful approach I have seen with online tools, are ones that download to your device, and sync/update when you get back to an internet connection. Simpler models of this are music download services, and video download services (rather than video streaming services.) Basically so you can carry your content with you, and back it up quickly to devices. Consumers want freedom over their data.
Ok, they're easier to maintain on several clients, but seriously now...
they fucking suck. Admit it, you only deliver to that platform because you're too fucking lazy or stupid to code cross-platform.
The point is what is the motivation for someone to hack into your computer and get personal information? What profit is there in personal communcations?
Blackmail, identity theft, revenge, stalking, burglary, kidnapping. Namely, the more valuable you are, the greater the value of information about you. Doubly so if you have enemies and/or very angry and very knowledgable ex-girlfriends.
If somebody hates you and has access to any private information about you, the chance of that information being used to hurt you is non-zero.
Or maybe, you know, it was /.'d. But of course that never happens to a server running on a *nix platform and Apache httpd, because those magically overcome any lack of bandwidth or lack of processing power from an unexpected surge in load.
Seriously, just Shut. The. Fuck. Up.