The Wide, Weird World of Glide

If there was an award for "Most Ambitious New Web Service of 2005," it might well go to Glide Effortless, which a startup called TransMedia launched on Wednesday. Glide aims to let you manage and share music, videos, photos, presentations, and other items online, transcoding them on the fly so you don't, in theory, have to worry about file formats. It's an e-mail program, a contact database, an RSS reader, a photo-printing service, a blogging tool, and a Web site builder, too. And it says it'll soon be a photo editor, a music store, a ringtone vendor, a videoconferencing system, and a whole lot more. Did I mention that it also plans to sell French chocolates? (Note: The last sentence was a statement of fact, not playful hyperbole.)

Describing Glide briefly is practically impossible. To use the service, you upload documents and media files from your PC; a free version of the service gives you 100MB of space, and you can get a lot more by springing for fee-based options. Once files live within Glide, you can get to them from any PC, use them to construct Web sites, and share them. (Sharing can be done with folks who don't have Glide accounts, and it's done through transcoded, streamed versions of files; among other things, this means that you can distribute them via e-mail, but yank them back after a certain number of viewings or a set timeframe.)

Using the word "Effortless" in your product name takes a lot of chutzpah. And Glide Effortless--in its current beta form, at least--doesn't come anywhere near living up to that moniker.

In some respects, though, it's an amazing, admirable piece of work. The user interface, which is built in Macromedia's Flash, is rich and deep, with plenty of drag-and-drop functionality; TransMedia really has built a Web-based operating system that lives inside your browser. Here's a glimpse of its look and feel (the color scheme's a tad dark for my tastes, but your mileage may vary):



I'd say that Glide was desktop-like, except it's resolutely not a clone of Windows or the Mac. Instead, it goes its own inventive way with concepts like Containers (which are a sort of combination of folders, albums, and playlists) and pie-shaped menus. It tries really, really hard to apply the same user-interface elements to everything from listening to music to addressing an e-mail.

This interface is intriguing, but also, at times, infuriating--almost everthing seems hobbled by a fixed-width approach that, for instance, often cuts off the end of file names. Much of the time, I found it surprisingly snappy; other times, such as when rendering thumbnails of my files, it just dragged. Both the Web service and the Windows-based file transfer software spawned some spectacular error messages.

The fact that there's almost no online help at the moment doesn't make things any easier. (The main Glide page prominently refers to my "casts," and I'm still not sure what they are.)

When I tried the service on Wednesday night it was fussy, frequently refusing to play back media and choking as I tried to upload files. On Thursday night, it worked better for a spell, then wouldn't let me log in at all. Both the Web service and the Windows-based Glide Link software spawned some spectacular error messages. TransMedia admits that the service is having teething pains, and says it hopes to resolve them soon.

As it stands, Glide is a sort of Winchester Mystery House of a service, with more nooks and crannies than seem absolutely necessary. The overall service is called Glide Effortless, but it lives at www.glidedigital.com. Once you're logged in, it redirects you to www.glidesociety.com. Subsections have names like Glide Personal, Glide Music, Glide Photos, and Glide Docs, and the file upload utility is called Glide Link. Various tiered services are known as Glide Free, Glide Standard, and Glide Premium. As it adds the long, long list of new services outlined on the Glide Effortless home page, things could get even more complicated.

Ultimately, it's not clear why the whole darn thing doesn't have one name (brilliant suggestion: "Glide") and a more unified structure.

One other issue: The service is one of the few I've encountered that expects you to provide credit card information even if you're registering for the free version. The signup system explains that it'll keep this information on file to simplify shopping at Glide Shops...which don't exist yet. I'd rather provide that data when and if I decide to shop with Glide.

Someday, I suspect, the core things that Glide is trying to do--letting you store your media and documents online, so you can wrangle them from any browser and share them with whoever you like--will be utterly commonplace. They may even become the primary way that most people get things done. But judging from what I've seen so far, Glide has a long way to go. You can try it out for yourself, though with its erratic behavior at the moment, you shouldn't shell out money for the fee-based versions just yet. And the credit-card requirement for the free version leaves me feeling like I can't even recommend that everyone who finds the idea appealing give it a test drive.

I will, however, be checking back. A more reliable, polished Glide still wouldn't be effortless-but it could be fun and useful.