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.

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

Here’s some of what you left out:

>>

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

–David Pogue

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

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.

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

Runtime Error

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

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.

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.

This is the web, not the auto industry.