Glubble

» see glubble.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Glubble was built for parents of children under twelve. In 2007 I was neither, which is most of why this one passed me by, and the other part is that it only ever mattered if your household shared one computer and one browser between people of very different ages.

That household was the whole design. Glaxstar launched Glubble for Families on 18 June 2007 as a 3.8 MB Firefox add-on, and what it did was replace the browser with a per-person version of itself. A parent set up accounts for everybody, and the child accounts came in two kinds depending on whether the child could read yet. The child's browser was a whitelist, seeded at launch with 350 approved properties including Disney.com and Nickelodeon.

The detail worth keeping is what happened when a child hit something that was not on the list. Most filtering software of that era answered with a wall and a scolding. Glubble answered with a request: the child could ask for the site, and the parent could approve the single link or the entire domain. It turned blocking into a conversation with a queue, which is a much harder product to build and a much better one to live with.

~ the whitelist ~

Glaxstar was a Dutch outfit in Amsterdam, founded in 2006, that made Firefox add-ons; the trademark was held by a separate entity called Glubble BV, and the footer of the 2009 site carefully credits Mozilla and Firefox as somebody else's registered trademarks. The company raised another million dollars and brought in a new CEO on the strength of the first version.

Version two widened the whitelist to around 2,500 ad-free sites and then widened the product past filtering altogether. By 2009 Glubble was a private family page with shared photos and a calendar of family events. The January 2010 homepage calls it "Where Families Play!", pushes a Premium Member tier, and advertises a free iPhone app whose entire job was uploading photos into the Family Timeline. For a parental control add-on, that is a long way from where it started.

~ the case file ~

~ what the parents lost ~

The last working capture of glubble.com was taken on 19 January 2010, and the page behind it was last modified on the 13th: still selling premium memberships, still listing the press it had been featured in. After that the archive has nothing at all until July 2014, by which point the domain is a parked stub. Somewhere in the gap the company stopped, and the gap is wide enough that the year is as precise as the record gets.

What is recorded is how it ended rather than exactly when. A former Glubble vice president answered a question on Mozilla's own support forum years later, explaining that management had decided to end the Glubble services without informing users. The add-on was a client for servers that were no longer there, so it did not uninstall itself or warn anyone. It simply stopped working, on whatever family computer it was still sitting on, during whatever week the servers went.

~ the name on the domain now ~

glubble.com still resolves. The site behind it is called "Glubble: Play Free Online Games", built by whoever holds the domain now, with no connection to Glaxstar or to anything described above. The name was the only part worth reusing.

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