Upload, store, play and share in a few clicks

In Hollywood, young screenwriters have "elevator pitches" always at the ready--pithy descriptions of their screenplays, intended to capture the imagination of passing movie executives. You know: "It's 'Titanic' on a spaceship." "It's a female 'Harry Potter.'" "It's 'Raising Arizona' meets 'Leaving Las Vegas.'"

Most of the time, high-tech companies can describe their products with equal efficiency, but not always. Take, for example, Glide Effortless, a new Web service that went live Wednesday. "What is Glide Effortless?" its news release asks. "It is a compatible browser-based online solution with integrated software and service environments, providing powerful file management, creation, communication, sharing and e-commerce capabilities."

Which leaves only one question: "What is Glide Effortless?"

Here's another stab: It's a personal Web site to which you can upload your favorite photos, MP3 files, video clips and even Word, PowerPoint or PDF documents. (A separate companion program speeds the uploading process by letting you drag and drop big batches of files at once.) Once everything's posted on the Web site, you can do two things with it: manage it or share it.

TransMedia, the company behind Glide, has some legitimate gripes about the way you have to perform these tasks on a Mac or PC. For example, you have to learn and use a different program to work with each file format: one to play music files, another to display photos, a third to play videos, and so on.

Sending your masterpieces to other people is a drag, too. If you attach your photos or videos to e-mail, you usually wind up overflowing the recipient's in-box and causing headaches for everyone. Posting your files on a Web site or a blog (Web log) is a better solution, but that requires more geeky knowledge than average people care to acquire.

Glide avoids all of these problems. It treats each file type--photos, songs, videos, documents--nearly identically, representing each file as a thumbnail icon in your personal stash. You use a menu to switch from one "environment" (say, photos) to another (like music). At the bottom of each environment is an area where you can create "containers"--that is, playlists (for music and video clips), albums (for photos), address book groups (for e-mail), and so on. You fill up these containers by simply dragging the appropriate thumbnails from the top part of the screen. You can even drag music files into photo or video containers, thereby creating musical soundtracks.

Total control
When you want other people to see your stuff, you can send invitations by e-mail. (Glide can import your address book from Outlook or Entourage.) When your recipients click the link in your message, they arrive at a Glide Web page, where they can view or play the files.

This system means that you never actually send any files, so you don't clog anyone's in-box. More important, you now have total control over the material. From the moment you upload a file to Glide, it's converted into an online preview. Your visitors can listen to one of your songs or watch one of your videos, but they can't download it, keep it, or even replay it without returning to the Web site.

As a result, you can limit how many times somebody plays or watches something, or specify a window of opportunity (say, Dec. 5 to 20) for people's access. You can even play Big Brother by tracking how many times each person has viewed or played a certain goody.

With just a few clicks, you can also publish one of your containers as either a Web page, complete with embedded pictures and videos, or a blog entry. It's almost automatic, although you have no control whatsoever over the layout of the result.

All of this is fun to use, thanks to a full-blown online operating system that Glide designed itself. After all, thought TransMedia, why make the site look like Windows or Mac OS X, when a custom design could be simpler and better tailored to Glide's functions?

In the Glide OS, each object on the screen--thumbnails, containers and so on--bears a tiny "badge" that resembles a pie chart. When you point to it, a round menu sprouts at your cursor tip. It lists commands pertaining to that object (Delete, Edit or Publish, for example), arrayed like colorful slices of a pizza.

Here's where you first get an inkling that for all of Glide's genius, it's also tainted by some profound problems.

For example, you quickly realize that a circle is not a very good shape for a menu. Because each command's name must be squeezed into a triangular wedge, the number of commands and the lengths of their names are severely restricted. As it is, some of Glide's command names (like "Download") barely fit on their slices.

The rule of thumbnails
Then there are those rows of thumbnail images. They make it easy to see what you're dealing with; video thumbnails play a snippet of moving images, and music files bear album-cover art. But once your collection grows beyond one screenful, those horizontal rows of icons present an infuriating challenge. You can't resize them to fit more on a page, and you can't view them as a scrolling list; you can only page through them as you would with results of a Google search. They take their sweet time to appear, too.

Worse, although thumbnails excel at conveying visual information, they fail miserably at conveying text information--like their names. Only a few characters of each file's name fit beneath each Glide thumbnail; on song names, all you get is "12 Rolling Th.." and "10 It's Too L.." The only way to see the full names of your songs is to double-click their icons one at a time, opening successive Info panels.

In spots--notably the e-mail and chat environments--the Glide online operating system gets in its own way, requiring ridiculous multistep procedures for what, in Windows or Mac OS X, would be the work of a few keystrokes. For example, addressing an outgoing e-mail message and attaching a file requires switching back and forth between multiple screens.

Figuring out how to do some simple tasks, like backing out of a photo container to your full collection, are challenges for puzzle lovers only. In rejecting the traditional operating-system elements, TransMedia has thrown out significant bits of baby along with the bathwater.

Part genius, part madness
You can sign up for any of three different Glide Effortless plans. There's a free service with a 100MB storage limit for your files; a $5-a-month plan with 1.5GB of storage; and a $10 monthly plan with 3GB of storage, along with video and audio conferencing. (Discounts are available if you pay for a year up front.) Right now, Glide is for Windows only. According to the company, Mac fans can sign up starting on Dec. 25.

The Glide of today is already a vast collection of tools, integrated into a software ecosystem that's half genius and half nuts. But it's nothing compared with what the company says is on the way: a full-blown Internet music store; an online store that lets you order products by dragging their icons into a shopping-cart "container"; a Unix version; a timeline calendar module; a built-in photo-editing suite; playback of music file formats beyond MP3; and even a corporate version "for the sale, promotion and distribution of media to consumers" that will offer a project-scheduling screen, among other perks.

Furthermore, TransMedia says that soon you'll be able to share one of your songs with friends--and if they like it, they can buy a copy-protected version of their own. The company will profit from the sale, of course, but so will you. You'll get a discount on your next music purchase.

Then there's the cell phone version of Glide, the set-top TV boxes and the customized versions the company hopes to sell to cable, phone and entertainment conglomerates.

All this from a company of only 24 people?

It's a little hard to believe. And sure enough, there are some telltale signs that the company may have bitten off more than it could chew. The company acknowledges, for example, that when the Glide music store opens, it won't offer music from the Big Four record companies--only the smaller independents. There's still no user manual or online help screens. And only 48 hours before the grand opening, big chunks of the service were still being snapped into place.

Still, Glide's core idea is unassailably fresh and useful: a centralized, Web-based scrapbook of so many kinds of files, with the ability to share it without actually giving up control of the files. If TransMedia's plans for world domination fall into place, maybe it won't need an elevator pitch. Maybe "you gotta try this" will be the only pitch it needs.