Glubble, which provides families with their own free social networks and also features a Firefox plugin that makes surfing the net safer and easier for children and hooks right into Glubble's web services, released a major update of its service today. Most importantly, Glubble now features a very well thought-out photo sharing solution, the Glubble Family Timeline, which also smartly incorporates messages and status updates. In conjunction with the release of the new family timeline feature, Glubble also announced a new premium product today, which, for $39.95 per year, allows users to upload and store more photos per month than the service's free offerings.]]>
Glubble also updated its Firefox toolbar, which now features a ticker that displays status updates from a user's family members as they are posted on the service's web site.
We first reviewed Glubble's browser plugin in 2007 (we called it 'impressive' back then) and we also took a closer look at the service's web offering in late 2008. We really liked the service in its earlier iterations, and since then, it has only become better. For a more detailed look at Glubble's features, please have a look at our earlier reviews.
Timeline
Alexander van Elsas, Glubble's CEO, gave us a demo of the service last week and he was clearly proud of the new timeline feature. While a lot of photo sharing services have moved towards organizing photos based on events, Glubble decided to go with a strict chronological order. The top of the page features a calendar, where you can pick a date, and the second row then features thumbnails from the four preceding and following days.
The timeline isn't quite as fancy as thisMoment's similar feature, but then, thisMoment, which came out of beta this week, is targeting a different audience. Glubble, however, does a great job at keeping things simple - an important aspect for a site that doesn't target cutting-edge users but wants to be inclusive even to novices on the web.
New CEO, New Funding
In addition to these new features, Glubble also announced that it received $1 million in a new funding round. With Alexander van Elsas, the company now also has a new CEO. Van Elsas used to be Glubble's COO, and takes over from Willem-Jan Schutte, one of Glubble's founders, who will remain on the non-executive board.
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