Glide Effortless is Too Much Effort

Totally agree. I had the same experience. Didn’t feel like disclosing my credit card data for who knows what. They should at least offer an option to test the service before asking for all this personal information.

I got a headache after looking at the homepage. Their parent company website is just as badly designed.
http://www.transmediacorp.com/

Wow, this is brutal. Agree with Mike’s comments, also: (without registering) 1) Show me, don’t tell me - is this lady’s site the only one I can see as an example? 2) Looking at the screen shots, the UI reminds me of one of those old Kai’s Power Tools programs - all UI, no productivity. 3) Am I the only one who thinks that this (http://www.glidedigital.com/storage.aspx) looks like a diagram straight out of 1999? I’m pretty sure my mom doesn’t know what “Rights management” is (nor would she care).

Hi guys,

I experienced the same… I passed trough the registration process giving my credit card number.
I created my own space. But the rest of the usage is not better!
I didn’t succeed in downloading any doc to my space. just creating a empty folder I was not really able to use…

I stoped after 15′ of trying to DO something.

“Registration Issues: We are aware that some of you have had difficulty attempting to register for the Glide Effortless service. An update was posted to resolve reported issues with the registration process at 12:30 AM EST on December 3, 2005, and additional updates have since been posted. Based on your feedback, we will continue to improve the registration process.”

Not so “effortless” then, eh?

Took the time to fill in all the info (yeah I do take risks) and then clicked the magic button…. and got the following message: “We’re sorry, but the system was unable to save and process your registration.
We apologize for any inconvenience.” and that’s it…. Too bad.

I don’t know about you, but a company that asks for your credit card and offers 150MB inspires me more confidence than one that doesn’t and offers “unlimited storage”/”unlimited trasnfer” etc.

And frankly, I don’t think anyone stole David Pogue’s credit card details, as probably we would have found out by now…

I took a look at the Glide home page. It’s poorly designed, and I can’t tell at a glance what it is or how to start using it.

Looking at the code reveals old Web 1.0 table soup. This project was definitely not a labour of love by cutting-edge designers.

I had massive problems trying to register for Glide Effortless last week - it was around the time of the Slashdotting, so I figured the site was getting screwed up by heavy traffic. But going back to it later, the registration form was still impossible, and - like you say - they require a credit card number even for free access. Even finding out what the service did was a chore:

http://mashable.com/2005/12/01.....p-sharing/

I don’t know of anyone who has successfully signed up for Glide - even after it made the frontpage of Slashdot. If it hadn’t been for the NY Times article, I doubt it would have attracted this much attention.

Lesson of the day: if you going to launch a web site, get feedback/input from everday internet users before you get some media hack to fluff your web site.

This is the web, not the auto industry.

Glide announces rebranding: the new name is “Glide with Great Effort”

I had a similar experience–I saw the site before reading the article, began the signup process, almost stopped when my address was required, but said “forget it” when my credit card was also required for a free account.

Glide’s opportunity for my business drifted away on the registration page as well. As if I’m giving my credit card info up just to see what it’s all about! I decided to complain about this so at least they have some feedback about how it affects people. However, I couldn’t find a way to contact them anywhere! No email link, nothing.

Perhaps it’s there and I’m just not finding it. Even if that is the case it is a testament to the poor design of the site that ability to contact them is so made so difficult.

So let’s sum it up, shall we: bloated content, web 1.0 markup, credit card required (even for free account), ugly website, cheesey promotion (Clarie Leka is the dudes wife), and is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who has had it up to here with software/websites/webapps that try to create their own “user interface” for their product. don’t get me wrong, i’m all for creativity, but don’t always reinvent the wheel. reminds me of the IBM commercial years ago where some creative designer kid was telling the CEO that what his business “really” needed was a “spinning logo”. ok, i’m done.

There’s no way I would trust a company with a website that looks like that with my credit card.

For a company purportedly having a sophisticated “Smarter User Interface” their website is anything but.

Perhaps it is a great service, but it took me five seconds looking at the page to bounce, despite any good reviews it may have gotten.

You’d think the Times and other major media companies could find better things to write about. The writer must not be too technical “a full-blown online operating system” — give me a break, a web app — yes.

However, I think Glide here is innovating, or at least trying to. It is still way too hard to publish media to the web (even with Flickr / Picasa) and share it with others / integrate with blogs.

There is a huge demand for a easy service that provides this kind of service. I could see Yahoo developing a really cool platform that might blow this away.

P.S. The examples didn’t seem to render properly in my firefox 1.5 install.

Haha, I did the same exact thing the other day. It looked interesting, went through the registration, got to the point where it asked for the CC Number.

Without the service providing enough information as to why it is important they store my credit card, I will not store it anywhere - not on any service. A lot of checkout systems don’t even store CC Numbers.

So, yeah. I just gave up, as you did. It can store everything else (photos, mp3, pdf, etc.) as it should, but please not my CC. You have to earn my trust first

I did exactly the same thing. It looks promising, but the UI is clunky, and I don’t part easily with my CC number.

This echoes my experience exactly. I was distrustful about their bad site design. I had been there 2 days before its launch and it had a WAY better site then, not great but ok. The registration is a mess, therefore insecure IMO.

I am really, really surprised David Pogue is praising this.

I have no idea what the NYT is up to these days. Their tech picks are awful.

Great user experience when trying to sign up from the home page link:
https://account.glidesociety.com/default.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/register/Default.aspx

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
——————————————————————————–

Runtime Error

Pretty obvious how glide got so much press coverage with the ceo’s wife being in the New York media.

A testimony to what a good PR campaign for a mid-level (at best) product can do.

I love that company’s forget about the consumer, and try to make it as hard as possible. I love digicam stuff, and I couldn’t get past the homepage to try out the service.

Take a look again. They seem to have taken care of a lot of the things that have been frustrating everybody. Its an Interesting cocept and the benefits will out weigh the initial agrevation

Wow! They must have totally overhauled the product. I’m finding the whole experience quite fun and publishing a website was a blast. I think these Glide folks have finally achieved what they set out to do… kick Microsoft’s and Google’s butt.

Chutzpah yes…but also excellent customer service. I have submitted several suggestions to Glide and the customer support has been personal and responsive. There is a depth of functionality in Glide that I have not seen before in any online service. I am intrigued. I don’t see Google or Microsoft pulling this one off.

This is how people will be sharing their files in the future. Glide is one of the more interesting programs to come around in a long time.

Weird how the last four (all non-attributable) comments ALL date from 7 to 8 days after the rest AND are the polar opposite from all the others….

Well, I’m like the vast majority of people here who haven’t tried it. But it’s funny to read post after post of people so harshly judging something they haven’t tried. And then one guy actually says he doesn’t understand why David Pogue praised it? Well, one thing is–he appears to have actually used the thing.

Now, there is a lesson here for the Glide people. It’s that many users have such a low threshold for curiosity that unless you practically do it for them and then compliment them on their hair, they won’t try anything new. That’s what has kept Windows so dominant in the face of one superior product after another.

Bitch about the registratio process all you want. The credit card trick is almost certainly to keep from letting people spawn a thousand accounts apeice. It appears to be a uniqueness-check. Imperfect, surely, but effective enough. Without it, I suppose I could have as many accounts as names that I could think up (I’m not as limited as our host, who apparently couldn’t think of anything except “techcrunch” and gave up in a fit of pique). With the credit card verification, I’d be stuck with no more than 4 accounts.

One thing I think everybody should do, by the way, is get a credit card with an ultra-limited credit limit. Use it on sites you’re not entirely sure about. That way, if somebody turns out to be bad, you’ve limited how much they can hurt you. It’s an idea, at least. It’s on the same lines as getting disposable email addresses to give when you don’t trust the person asking. Most of us probably do that.

Regards,
Ron

You call my review of Glide “glowing?” Maybe that’s because you selectively excerpted it. All you quoted is the description–not the judgement!

Here’s some of what you left out:

>>

That is not what any sane person would call “glowing.”

–David Pogue

You call my review of Glide “glowing?” Maybe that’s because you selectively excerpted it. All you quoted is the description–not the judgement!

Here’s some of what you left out:

—Here’s where you first get an inkling that for all of Glide’s genius, it’s also tainted by some profound problems.

For example, you quickly realize that a circle is not a very good shape for a menu. Because each command’s name must be squeezed into a triangular wedge, the number of commands and the lengths of their names are severely restricted. As it is, some of Glide’s command names (like “Download”) barely fit on their slices.

Then there are those rows of thumbnail images. They make it easy to see what you’re dealing with; video thumbnails play a snippet of moving images, and music files bear album-cover art. But once your collection grows beyond one screenful, those horizontal rows of icons present an infuriating challenge. You can’t resize them to fit more on a page, and you can’t view them as a scrolling list; you can only page through them as you would with results of a Google search. They take their sweet time to appear, too.

Worse, although thumbnails excel at conveying visual information, they fail miserably at conveying text information - like their names. Only a few characters of each file’s name fit beneath each Glide thumbnail; on song names, all you get is “12 Rolling Th..” and “10 It’s Too L..” The only way to see the full names of your songs is to double-click their icons one at a time, opening successive Info panels.

In spots - notably the e-mail and chat environments - the Glide online operating system gets in its own way, requiring ridiculous multistep procedures for what, in Windows or Mac OS X, would be the work of a few keystrokes. For example, addressing an outgoing e-mail message and attaching a file requires switching back and forth between multiple screens.

Figuring out how to do some simple tasks, like backing out of a photo container to your full collection, are challenges for puzzle lovers only. In rejecting the traditional operating-system elements, TransMedia has thrown out significant bits of baby along with the bathwater…

There are some telltale signs that the company may have bitten off more than it could chew. The company acknowledges, for example, that when the Glide music store opens, it won’t offer music from the Big Four record companies - only the smaller independents. There’s still no user manual or online help screens. And only 48 hours before the grand opening, big chunks of the service were still being snapped into place.—

That is not what any sane person would call “glowing.”

–David Pogue

I seriously doubt that David Pogue would respond in October of 2006 to a blog posted in December of 2005. This is old news covering launch problems typical of major new and unusually innovative product releases.

However if this really is David Pogue, his overall open minded and generally positive view about Glide is echoed by virtually every other major business and technology publication that has reviewed Glide. For all of it’s quirks, bottom line this is a great product.

As a Glide user from pretty much the beginning, I am continually blown away by the rate of innovation and the speed of transformation of this product.

It seems odd that TechCrunch, which prides itself on covering new technologies, has not reviewed Glide Mobile or Glide Sync, which work very well and are breakthrough products that Microsoft itself has failed to deliver. If you have a beef with their policies regarding identity verification, that is a debate to be had but it doesn’t make sense to deny your readership vital information about the technology industry.

I read in Red Herring that Trans media the company that created Glide is a New York based angel funded company. I wonder if in VC funded Silicon Valley this might be part of the problem here. I hope that tech crunch is not really VC Crunch because quite frankly we all know the stifling environment that VC’s can create. You are all respected members of the so-called web 2.0 community and there is no reason why there can’t be a difference of opinion and civilized debate in tackling important issues like the right to privacy on the Internet.

Transmedia’s website says that a new version called Glide 2.0 is launching soon. I enjoy reading Tech Crunch from time to time and hope to read about first here.

I tried to register for site given 2.0 was coming out to try out. I even added my credit card info. Never got email to complete registration and I tried twice with a yahoo and gmail email address and different user names. wonder if this is a scam. Try http://eyeos.org/screenshots for an alternative!