They must carry plastic at a much younger age…
by schwim on Apr.27, 2008, under Software
I hate the thought of my daughter using the computer. I know that’s odd for a person that spends the majority of their conscious time using one, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. I know how depraved you all are and want to protect her from that.
For that reason, I’m always on the lookout for a children’s portal or community to ease her into the dark underbelly of the interweb. My most recent find was Glubble. Touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread by nameless groups and clubs that probably don’t exist, I was excited to install it and try it out.
Glubble is a portal. They gather up all of the popular commercial sites that children already go to, link to them on a single start page, then spend the rest of their time posting testimonials to their site and making blog entries about the awards they are winning. I was entranced with all the great things said about Glubble(conveniently posted on Glubble’s site). I decided to give it a test drive.
The very first thing I noticed was how many advertisements can fit on a single web page. If you’ve ever visited Barbie.com, Nickelodeon.com or Disney.com, you know what I mean. There are flash banners, text ads and graphics surrounding a single flash game that more often than not does not work. The ads always work, however. They spend much more time developing the ads than they do the games, it seems.
The second thing I noticed was that the Glubble developers disabled AdBlock Plus. Attempting to create a filter for the ads doesn’t do a single thing other than waste a few seconds of your time.
In spite of this absolutely glaring flaw, I decided to let NatureTot try it out. I can say with no doubt that you’re better off just visting a web page in any browser. We ended up copying links from Glubble, then opening another instance of Firefox without the Glubble addon to try to play the games. Glubble’s application overlay doesn’t always work properly, the flash applets were sluggish and non-responsive while playing and a few times the application froze the browser completely.
This was not the worst aspect of our experience, however. Remember those ads I told you about? My daughter spent more time trying to get out of a secure shopping experience than she did playing a game. She would see a pretty banner and click on it, and end up halfway through ordering credits for My Secret Pony e-feed before I stopped her. It’s no surprise, as I counted 11 ads on a single page while she was trying to play a game. One thing Glubble did do for our daughter was let her know how hard companies will try to sell something to any person with a pulse. Tot now feels the same way about them that we do.
“Is this a game, daddy?”
“No hon, that’s an ad.”
“Dirty birds.”
“That’s right, baby.”
Glubble can post all of the accolades that they want, but the only rating I was concerned about was quite explicit: Glubble was rated a complete bomb by 100% of the children in my house.
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February 27th, 2009 on 3:54 pm[...] while ago, I told you all what a steaming pile a certain app geared for lil’uns was. One of the app’s developers came to the rescue of his application and told me that I was [...]
April 28th, 2008 on 6:39 am
Glubble is not a portal. You have been using an Add-on for Firefox. The add-on restricts your childs browsing to only the websites that exist in their “glubbles” that you as a parent are free to add new sites to or take away any site from.
In short it enables you to create a personal listings of sites that YOU (not glubble) want your child to experience, don’t like a particular site? YOU take it out, it is free and totally in your control.
Moreover if your child searches on google, then the glubble plug in automatically changes google results and throws out any urls that are not listed in your childs glubbles.
Glubble works with adblock.
Your blog post sounds like criticism of websites showing ads, rather than glubble itself. Glubble comes preindtalled with over 1000 sites 50/50 fun/education.
Finally you should realise that even if a site shows an ad, if your child clicks on it and the URL of the ad is not in a glubble (which it won’t be unless its something like a nickJR ad linking to nickJR) then you will find that the page will be blocked.
Take time to actually use a product before blogging a review.
There are 25 people working full time on this product, all good people who passionately beleive in the cause to provide parents with a solution that works.
There are 50,000 active families using glubble now and over 1000 more downloading the add-on for Firefox each day.
From the get-go the tone of your post was disparraging I hope this is because you dearly want a genuine solution that puts your KIDS FIRST over commercial objectves, glubble let’s you do that. Take out sites you don’t like based on your own cultural beliefs and use it for free to give your kids the web you want. It is your right to bring up your kids as you want, glubble now let’s you do this online too.
I hope I’ve helped you fill in the gaps in your understanding of glubble, your kids deserve the chance to experience a web YOU can provide for them.
Best regards,
Ian Hayward, Founder Glubble
(blogged from iphone apologies in advance for any typos)
April 28th, 2008 on 7:15 am
Hi there Ian, and thanks for the comment.
Merriam Webster States: Portal: a site serving as a guide or point of entry to the World Wide Web and usually including a search engine or a collection of links to other sites arranged especially by topic
It is a portal. Call it what you want, but that’s what it is. I’m aware that it’s customizable, and if you’ll look at my comment on your development blog that went unanswered, I state that it would have been nice to give the user a less commercial starting point instead of making them strip everything you provide out and start clean. I could have just installed a net nanny product and had been better off, since most of the sites you provide by default are sites that I don’t want my child to visit due to their ad tactics.
The fact is this. On the same computer with the same install of Firefox, I can block ads. Hop into a profile with Glubble and Adblock Plus installed, I can no longer block them. If this is considered Adblock working with Glubble, then ok, it works with Glubble. Since the ads are for the products that are on the page you’re visiting, you often don’t leave the domain. It’s a nice gesture to block the terrible sites trying to sell something to my five year old that are not on your list, but what about the terrible sites trying to sell something to a five year old that you place on my daughter’s start page?
I understand you have to hop around on the web and put out fires where you find them, but I’ve used it. I know how it works, and I don’t need a founder to put a nice spin on it. You tell me to take some time to use it before I review it. I used it. A lot. Then my daughter used it. A lot. We both found it to be a very disappointing experience.
I explained that I could provide my child the same or better experience with a standard install of Firefox and some bookmarks, since the links you provide by default are nothing but crass ads packed on top of more crass ads. I still feel that way. I’m one of the 1,000 downloads a day that you quote. As you can see, those numbers don’t mean much, do they?
thanks,
json
(blogged from a stone tablet and chisel, so I apologize for any typos.)
April 28th, 2008 on 1:37 pm
Trust is like beauty it is in the eye of the beholder. Some people like and trust Disney, some don’t. Some parents strongly object to ads on websites and some do not object so strongly.
This is not about spin json, nor is it an attempt to prove a point or debate rights or wrongs.
I took the time to respond to your post because I genuinely wish to offer you the facts and to engage with you as a parental user of Glubble. I apreciate you taking the time to blog about it, I will investigate who was moderating the forum when your post was not answered.
We conduct dialog in an open and transparent way.
I guess we can’t please all people all the time. You know what? Funny thing is that once upon a time during our beta phase Glubble actually worked the way you described, all glubbles were disabled and sites had to be approved upfront so the default ‘good list’ was indeed empty, but too many parents complained and told us it was better to have them all enabled so they could remove any they did not want.
I will have an engineer look into your report about adblock plus and I will report back to you here.
Sounds like you would be happy with a one-click option to ‘remove all sites’ along with adblock plus working, then you could add only the sites you want and block all visual ads too.
Would you like us to add these features?
What else can we improve?
Many thanks, I apreciate your passion.
Ian Hayward
Glubble does not serve any ads to children, it simply allows them to see a ‘good list’ of sites on the web.
April 28th, 2008 on 1:42 pm
btw – just as an FYI for your readers, adding links to bookmarks and installing adblock does not prevent a child wandering off to a bad site by accident, there would be no blocking of non-allowed urls in the method you previously mentioned. There would be no regulation of google search results either.
April 28th, 2008 on 3:49 pm
Hi there Ian,
If you really want to know how I would go about it:
1) Allow community review/rating of sites, then allow addition to new installs via filters or groups. If I want to start out by adding all non-commercial sites that offer primarily educational activities and are rated three stars or greater, I should be able to choose non-commercial/educational/5-10 year olds/3-5 stars and either add them by batch, or select them individually from the resulting list.
2) Parent accounts can get top 10 new/top rated glubbles every time they log in on their welcome page. As well, they should be able to subscribe and get notification any time a glubble is added that matches their filter criteria for each sub account.
3) Glubble could initially populate a new member’s panel by simply asking a couple questions then matching other users’ lists that are a close match to age/preference/sex, etc.
There’s lots of other things you could do to make it more appealing, but these three things would make it a completely comprehensive and intuitive system for families. As it stands now, it’s nothing more than a white-list with everything including the kitchen sink thrown in.
You are right that Glubble in it’s current iteration can not be everything to everyone. It could be though, with some changes that allow the end user to tailor the system to their liking.
thanks,
json