A Glubble Is Born
June 20th, 2007 5
As some of you know, I moved jobs recently to work for the Birmingham based Glaxstar as their in-house web / UI guy, and I have my first major bit of news… Glubble is born!
Glubble is a extension for Firefox aimed at children under 12, and aims to provide a fun, safe browsing environment for them. It comes with around 350 sites (in what we call the Glubble World) that have been pre-vetted as safe and just downright cool for kids. The parents and extended family and friends (’helpers’) can then add sites to the childs Glubble.
And vise-verse, If a child clicks on a link they’re not allowed to see, they can ask a ‘helper’ for permission. So Glubble is infinitely extensible, and very personal to a particular family, group, school, whatever!
There’s a new UI for kids too! It includes a thumbnail bar so kids can easily view and click on their bookmarks. It even screenshots new sites that are bookmarked for easy of finding later.
It’s a shared experience too, and it’s easy to add other kids or helpers into your Glubble. They then can request from the new helpers and the helpers can add sites for their new Glubble children!
And the Reaction?
The whole team, especially those currently in the USA have worked their proverbial socks off, and many a late night has been spent hunched over a laptop screen to get this launched on time. I for one am very proud and privileged to work with such a bunch of hardworking, driven people.
The reaction from users and tech-heads around the net has been somewhat mixed. I’m pleased to say that we managed over 1000 downloads in the first 24-hours. The product has had mentions and reviews galore, not least by such shining lights as The Washington Post, Wired, Lifehacker, CNET and Techcrunch… (to name but a few).
But don’t take their word for it, why not just bing-bash-bosh download yourself a copy from glubble.com and try it for yourself. Just remember, you need Firefox to run it, but that’s ok, Firefox is probably better than your average web-browser anyway.
- Jon.
5 Comments (+0 in the moderation queue).
#1 On June 20th, 2007 at 3:13 pm Kris said...
Sounds like a cool product from the parents point of view mate, but I think i’d be pretty pi**ed off if this had been available when I was 12. That would have seriously hindered my ability to download copious amounts of sordid porn! Which just wouldn’t have been fair at all!!!
#2 On June 20th, 2007 at 4:44 pm Paul said...
Great work Jon! The new website looks beautiful (if not then a little garish in places). However there seems to be an eagerness to mix both the cool fox family illustration with the logo, which just looks a bit weird and overplayed if you ask me.
As to the software, I had a quick play with it last night, and whilst it is still certainly beta (a lot of ugly Times New Roman showing up for me) it looks pretty sweet. I like how the extension mixes almost invisibly the web with the XUL interface.
The only thing that concerns me is that the success of this product depends on the successfulness of parents to install additional software so that clever tech-savvy kids don’t just fire up IE instead. I think communication and education is key here, and that’s why I was surprised not to see more information on other products parents should install on the Glubble site. All in good time I’m sure…
#3 On June 21st, 2007 at 8:13 am Paul II said...
I agree with Paul here - I like how the extension mixes almost invisibly the web with the XUL interface. But what do I know!
P.S. We got too much water now!!
#4 On June 21st, 2007 at 9:30 am Jon said...
Paul 2… Send some of it this way, I’m parched!
#5 On March 14th, 2008 at 3:33 am John Howell said...
I’m setting up an ancient laptop (1.7Ghz single core cpu, 256 MB RAM) with Ubuntu to use as family hack PC to float around the lounge or for the kids to do homework on.
I had already given each of my two kids their own login and desktop profiles, tied each one down to only having the application groups I wanted on the tool bar (removed the application menu and just added each app group to the panel as required) but was missing an easy linux friendly way to restrict their internet browsing.
Glubble does just that, and because its for Firefox, works a treat in Linux too. Fantastic additional plugin.