Glide File Sharing Service Debuts

Dotnaught writes "Glide Effortless has gone live. New York Times columnist David Pogue describes it as "full-blown online operating system" that's a mix of genius and interface awkwardness. (Glide has been covered previously on Slashdot.) Pogue concludes "Glide's core idea is unassailably fresh and useful. If TransMedia's plans for world domination fall into place, maybe it won't need an elevator pitch. Maybe 'You gotta try this' will be the only pitch it needs.""

Comments

YOU NEED MY CREDIT CARD???

[Datagod]

What kind of legitimate service needs my credit card information to "verify" the details of my registration? I thought to myself, yeah, this sounds cool...give them my usual false info...then BANG...Please give us your credit card information even though you have selected the free account...We promise that no bad hackers can get your personal information... Whatever...these bozos wont last long... I use everything GOOGLE all day long, and they have never EVER asked me for my credit card.

Re:YOU NEED MY CREDIT CARD???

[Anonymous Coward]

They need your cc so if RIAA spots anything they don't like, Glide will service the charge!

Credit Card?

[Jackdaw Rookery]

No way will I ever use this while it asks for a Credit Card when you click Free Subscription.

Why would I give you that? Why do you need access to my money when I have no intention of buying anything from you. After all that was why I selected free.

My prediction? Icarus-like nosedive....

[Chaffar]

Or I haven't understood the thing, or it's a completely useless service.

So basically, it's a system that's let's me let other people see what I have, but they can't copy the file for themselves... Ingenious, from a legal standpoint, but I really doubt it'll pick up. From an older article: "The system is smart enough to identify copyrighted music that has been uploaded by users into the system."http://informationweek.com/story/showArtic le.jhtml?articleID=173402852

If the system is that smart, why would a "no-copying"policy be required? Hmmm ? Since the files being shared aren't copyrighted, I shouldn't be prohibited from sharing them.

Me says this is a piece of schizophrenic software that doesn't really know where it wants to be, and it probably will be too bandwidth hungry for most people to present any kind of interest.

But then again, maybe I haven't understood the thing :-/

Whoopie

[nickgrieve]

David Pogue describes it as "full-blown online operating system"

Right... so why on earth should I give his opinon any creedance when its ovbious he does not even know what an OS does, to me Glide... look like Yet Another Blog Site

As with...

[MaestroSartori]

...many others here, I find it very off-putting that I'm required to enter my credit card details for a free trial. That very requirement has just lost them a customer, since I refuse to provide credit card details to people who don't intend to charge me for anything.

I remember free-trial-card-required things like this from a few years back, and I didn't take them up then. I don't really enjoy having sites store my credit card information at all, and wish they wouldn't. After all, what's to stop a billing error, or a hacker harvesting my card number, or a disgruntled employee using my card to buy kiddie porn, or anything else? One-off entry is much nicer. I just wish I knew for sure how many internet stores kept records of my card details, before finding out the hard way one day :(

Re:Secure?

[flyingsquid]

These guys can't seem to figure out what they want to do, though. Their site highlights Glide Personal, Glide Photos, Glide Music, Glide Music Shop, Glide Videos, Glide Docs, Glide Allmedia, Glide Contacts, Glide Mailshare, Glide Liveshare, Glide Calendar, Glide Timeline, Glide Shops... I take one look at this and think,"this is supposed to _simplify_ my life?"

These guys seem to be (a) overly ambitious, trying to conquer the known universe with their site, and (b)confused, lacking a clear strategy or a well thought out business model... dude, that is just so 1999.

Re:Herald Tribune Web Design

[Jugalator]

Besides the column view, clicking on the first column takes you back a page, and clicking on the last takes you forward a page. On top of that, it actually loads the entire article so going back and forth is instantaneous with no server communication, semi-AJAX (not sure about the XML) style.

They clearly spent more time on their content presentation than most news sites, and it shows.

Is it just me...

[Adam Heine]

...or does this news post seem more like an ad than news? 83% of it is just blather from some journalist whose seems as far from being a Slashdotter as I am from being a Chinese jet pilot.

I've had this for 2 years already

[dJOEK]

I don't see how this is new. It exists already a long time and it's called .Mac

advantage of open source

[phantomfive]

The article says:
The Glide of today is already a vast collection of tools. But it's nothing compared with what the company says is on the way: a full-blown Internet music store; an online store that lets you order products by dragging their icons into a shopping-cart "container"; a Unix version; a timeline calendar module; a built-in photo-editing suite; playback of music file formats beyond MP3; and even a corporate version.

All this from a company of only 24 people?

Behold the advantage of open source: a small number of people quickly can make something really cool, by building on code that is already out there. You need to play any music file format? No problem, just hack something together using SOX. Photo-editing suite? Reading multiple image-formats is simple, just take some code from GIMP or SDLimage.

Back in the 90s one of the big selling points of OOP was code reusability saving time developing new products. Didn't work so well then, partly because of the difficulty in developing a collection of high quality parts. What we are seeing now with the internet and open source is a rich library of useful code that anyone can use, so long as they are willing to give back to the community.

Patenting pie menus?

[Lars Arvestad]

On the web page describing "the intelligent user interface", I could read this:

Glide introduces a real alternative to old school file menu and toolbar navigation, with the patent-pending Glide Action Bubble

From what I can discern, the "bubble" is a pie menu. And they are trying to patent it? That sounds lame, on the verge to stupid.

Yep - I stopped there too

[CrazedWalrus]

I started signing up, just to check out the site. Got to the mandatory credit card, pressed Cancel, and probably won't try it again for a few weeks to see if they've changed it. If not, this'll be a service I simply don't use.

Glide: I don't lightly give my credit card number out to random internet sites -- especially when I'm not buying anyting. I'm not paying for the next gimmick until I've seen if it's useful. If you won't let me see if it's useful without my credit card, then you've lost a potential customer, and I've moved on with my life the way it's always been.

Maybe Bill is truly a genius...

[MyOtherUIDis3digits]

I know my first reaction to this is similar to many others -- keep all my data on someone else's servers? No thanks. But maybe the "permanent" merging of IE and Windows was just step one in the seemingly inevitable convergence of desktop OS and Internet. Step two was a plethora of security flaws that got people used to the fact that their data could possibly be easily accessed by unknown entities on the web. Step three, which is starting now, is to let other companies innovate the technology and work out the bugs and issues involved. Then of course use their monopo^H^H^H market share to take over the market. This would be followed by, "So, keep your data on your own pc that you know we can't secure for you, or keep it on our WinNet(tm) servers which are secure? No more worrying about security / virus / malware updates - we take care of that for you! Access all your data from anywhere! All for a low monthly fee!" Think about it...