There are few, if any, horizontal platforms that offer users the capability to e-mail, create, and edit documents and pictures, and collaborate across all three major desktop computing platforms as well as almost every major smartphone platform. Glide 3.0 has just updated, introducing changes aimed at parental control and creating a child-friendly environment.
Glide's circular interface with pie-chart divisions makes navigating a more interesting task.
(Credit: Glide)The new e-mail filter lets parents intercept all messages sent to a child's in-box. Parents can then approve or deny the e-mails so children can only see preapproved messages, filtering out pornographic spam, phishing attempts, and other junk. Parents need to create a secondary e-mail account in Glide that they can control access rights too, similar to how Glide allows rights controls for attachments if you're familiar with that system.
From there, parents will be able to access the child's e-mail from a drop-down menu on the upper right corner of the e-mail interface. When the parent enters the child's account, they can approve each e-mail individually or as a group by clicking on the e-mail and clicking Approve or Delete. Since all e-mails sent to the child default as unapproved until given a green light, parents don't have to worry about children seeing unauthorized e-mails.
Both children and adult can take advantage of the new drawing and coloring tool. It works a bit like MS Paint, except with Glide's collaborative tools built in, and a much more interesting interface. Colors appear as crayons in a box, and users can choose from preselected backgrounds, a blank canvas, or images in their own libraries to drawn on. Standard drawing tools are included, such as a freehand pen, line tools, typographic text, and shapes. Glide Draw also offers zooming and undo/redo. The tools can be accessed from the Draw text link at the bottom of Glide's main interface.
Existing features in Glide have also gotten a power boost. E-mail import and export capabilities have been overhauled. An Import button will copy the body text of an e-mail into a Glide Write document, while the new Export button creates a PDF, DOC, DOCX, or RTF out of the body text. Attachments can also be one-clicked to a destination folder, and Glide Writer and the Glide e-mail interfaces have seen a design redo.
Interestingly, the Glide Application suite has been integrated into Glide e-mail, so that the word processor, presentations application, photo editor, and collaborative tools are available to all e-mail recipients. Even if you're not a Glide user, the tools will be available to you. This includes automatic group discussions and online meetings. Utilizing Glide Desktop Applications (download for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris) participants can synchronize the files that they're discussing.
Webkit-based browsers Safari and Chrome also earned full support in the Glide OS improvements.
Its stunning cross-platform usability and its equally impressive granular rights-granting for file-sharing and attachments aside, performance improvements appear to not have been part of the most recent Glide OS update. It's not the fastest loading Web application, but users looking for something that will function anywhere on almost any desktop or handheld should check it out.
Social-networking savant Flock has announced a re-branded version of its browser aimed at fashionistas. At the very least, it's aimed at people who like the color pink and lipstick marks on their advertising. Called Gloss, it's a pink-and-purple themed edition of Flock 1.2 that comes with fashion-related feeds and bookmarks pre-loaded.
The Gloss rebuild of Flock shows the pinker side of browsing.
(Credit: Flock, Inc.)The list of baked-in feeds for the Windows-only Gloss includes Cosmopolitan, TMZ, Glam.com, PopSugar, and These Boots Are Made for Stalking.
Gloss is getting pimped as a "fun" version of Flock, although I could've sworn that Flock received the same PR campaign comparing it to Firefox. Either way, it's hard to argue with a browser that promotes itself as a place where, "Your friends are always there--just like celebrities in rehab." It's hard to argue, of course, because sometimes it's better to just walk away. Slowly. Beyond having the topical feeds included and the new color scheme, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to get Gloss.
Flock itself has also received a couple of upgrades. The Flock 2 beta (download for Windows and Mac) goes up another point, incorporating the Firefox 3.0.1 security patch along with other bug-fixes. The Flock people are promising a lengthy beta cycle, so expect there to be at least one more update.
The official version of Flock (download for Windows and Mac) also gets a bump up, addressing bugs and security holes fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.16. Again, no major roadwork going on here, but it's definitely a good idea to upgrade to ensure that old exploits don't cause you grief.
Yahoo Mail, the top provider of Web-based e-mail, is letting users sign up with the ymail.com and rocketmail.com domains in an attempt to attract new users and keep existing ones loyal.
The move is geared to help people find a better e-mail address, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. "We want users to get the exact e-mail account they want so they stay with us for life," he said.
Because "yourname@yahoo.com" is likely taken by now, a lot of people must resort to unpleasant and hard-to-remember addresses such as "yourname1988@yahoo.com." Yahoo wants to give people a new chance with a name they like.
Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)The rocketmail name dates back to Yahoo's $92 million acquisition in 1997 of Four11, a company that offered the free RocketMail service.
"It's a great brand," Kremer said. "Those who have no memory of our service in the late 1990s indicated they like it, and those who indicated they want to be retro like it for the fact that it's associated with Yahoo.com since the beginning."
Maybe it's retro for Yahoo, too, which is under fire from shareholders after a bruising takeover attempt by Microsoft. Probably plenty of employees enjoy thinking nostalgically about the company's dot-com glory days. But the company is trying to move forward, too, with Mail one major part of the company's Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS) strategy.
Open mail
Through YOS, Yahoo is trying to make its online services a foundation for third-party applications. For mail, that means letting other applications appear on the Mail "canvas," Kremer said.
In this area, Kremer said, Yahoo was inspired by technology the Yahoo got through its acquisition of online e-mail specialist Zimbra in 2007.
"Zimbra was a pioneer in opening up Web services within the Zimbra application. They have open applications within their space that are used all over the place," he said.
There are now "no walls" between Yahoo Mail and Zimbra engineers, he added, though the business units are separate. "They share a lot of what they do. You'll see in very short order products on our site built on their technology, and vice versa," Kremer said.
The Internet company revamped its Yahoo Mail interface beginning three years ago, calling the update the "all-new Yahoo Mail" for well over a year now. The new interface is based on technology from Yahoo's 2004 acquisition of Oddpost.com.
The "all-new" badge will be removed "pretty soon," Kremer added.
Rolling Thunder
Yahoo plans a "rolling thunder of announcements" around Yahoo Mail in the next six to eight months, he added. Some significant changes will include as a "smarter inbox," work to make Yahoo Mail fit better in today's world of social networking, and the opening of the mail platform, he added.
It's a good thing, because there are plenty of competitors--not just traditional Web mail outfits such as Microsoft Hotmail, AOL, and up-and-coming Google Gmail, but also social sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Yahoo considers the full spectrum of competition, though.
"What we believe here at Yahoo is all communication is eventually coming together," Kremer said. "You don't need to bounce out to a separate social communications site or a different social event site when most of those tools are really just communications. If it's built on the same address book and calendar information, you can see them coming together in a single, more productive, smarter inbox."
The latest Flock update for Windows and Mac introduces more services to its ever-growing list of options, as well as a battery of performance and stability enhancements.
Most notably, Pownce and Digg have been integrated as people services. If you're not familiar with the self-styled "social browser," this means that you can perform all Digg- and Pownce-related chores--sorry, that should be "tasks"--from within the browser's social-networking features. Support for AOL Webmail has also been added, letting you check that account as easily as your Gmail account.
There's still a long list of known bugs that Flock has documented as in need of a fix.
Since Flock is a fork of the Firefox code that's been around for about a year, it will be interesting to see if future Flock updates attempt to integrate any Firefox 3 improvements or if they're going to pick their own migration pattern.
A few weeks ago I got to play around with Orgoo, a multi-client e-mail and IM service that's still in private beta. Right around the same time, another e-mail aggregation service, called Fuser, opened up its doors to everyone. Fuser, like Orgoo, lets you pull in a number of Webmail accounts from popular services, and view them in the same in-box, with handy color coding and several ways to separate which in-box you're looking at. Unlike its competitors however, Orgoo forgoes the instant messaging angle in place of integrating social networks, almost like what Flock offered when it first started out.
For now, Fuser is limited to MySpace and Facebook, although the company intends to expand into Orkut and others in the future. You can check out personal messages, or wall/comment posts for each of your accounts, as well as send new ones out like you would an e-mail. There's also a really neat "leaderboard" that will figure out how many times you've gone back and forth with one of your social networking contacts (for MySpace and Facebook), then place them in hierarchical importance. As Fuser's President Jeff Herman told me, this system trumps MySpace's top friends concept on a statistical level by actually showing you (privately) who you're chatting with the most. In my case, the results were surprising.
As far as an e-mail client goes, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, there's a whole lot here, like being able to hot swap which e-mail account you want the message to be from, and a quick autofill of your contact once you start typing out their name--not too shabby considering it's pulling in all that information from all over the Web.
My beef has to do with speed. It's a little bit too slow at this point to ditch your current Webmail provider. My shortest time for opening an e-mail was around 4 seconds, with the longest taking a full 12 seconds from when I clicked on the message to when I first saw text. For one or two messages this is fine, but if you plan on attacking several messages (which you likely are with multiple accounts), the lag puts a damper on the experience.
Despite the speed issue, I really like Fuser's openness. Even Orgoo, for its good looks and slightly faster performance, still required you to have a premium version of Yahoo and Hotmail to get in on the fun, whereas you can do it with any old free account on Fuser. The social networking angle is what's key here, and I think if they can improve on the speed, and add some more social sites, they might be able to do some of the cool things Flock and Plaxo are doing with social contacts and messaging management while maintaining their mailcentric roots.
View the mail on all your accounts, even the ones that get a bunch of BACN and spam.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
AOL released a couple of upgrades to its Webmail app today--they're not in the regular program yet, but if you're a desperate AOL junkie who wants to check them out, the new features can be tested on its beta site.
I gave the beta a brief spin, though I must say I haven't used AOL Webmail enough to really be able to compare it to anything. (I had to use my leftover screenname from AOL's early days to access it, and let's just say I haven't used AOL mail much since 2001.) The updates are basically for the purpose of making the program more user-friendly: a new, simplified interface that leaves more room for the e-mail content itself, no pop-up windows for new mail messages, and smoother running times. And like in Gmail, instant messaging is (somewhat) integrated into the mail client. You can see which of your contacts are online, but in order to IM them you have to be transferred to your instant-messaging software. Plus, there's a TMZ.com feed, because obviously every AOL Webmail user needs to have access to celebrity gossip at all times.
It looks all right. It's not going to make anyone switch to AOL Mail from Gmail or Yahoo, but it might prevent some AOL users from doing the reverse.
The beta version of AOL Webmail, for the record, is codenamed "Cayman." I'm not sure what the codename protocol is over there, but those out-of-the-blue nicknames have always puzzled me. I dare them to codename their next product with a friendly moniker that doesn't echo of big-money tropical island getaways. You know, like "Kittens." Or "Muffins." Come on, AOL's had worse ideas than that.
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