Five Across Bubbler, Feb 14

Five Across, the makers of the Intercomm workgroup-oriented IM and communications product, today introduced Bubbler, a weblog creation and publication tool. It is in beta until further notice.

Key Capabilities of Bubbler
Bubbler delivers the following key capabilities:

• Multiple pages per blog. A “page” in Bubbler is like a framework into which blog entries (“notes”), photos, and other items can be inserted. Each blog supports multiple pages.


• Rich media support. The Bubbler technology supports publishing text, video, photos, files, and other rich media entries. It works … all from an integrated interface within the Bubbler client.


• Rich client. Users must download and install a rich client for writing and posting material to their blog. The client is available for Windows (650 KB) and Mac OS X (450 KB).


• Hosted or Inhouse. Users can sign up for the hosted version of Bubbler, offered by Five Across, at a starting price point of $4.99. Alternatively, workgroups can install and manage their own Bubbler server. ISPs can offer Bubbler to their subscribers by using the OEM Bubbler server from Five Across.

Neat Things about Bubbler
Here's what I like about Bubbler:

• Easy to post. It is just a couple of clicks to create a new page and get a note (blog entry) posted. New users can get material up on the web within 5 minutes of starting.


• Reporter. This gives a way of instantly publishing material into a note via an IM client like pop-up. Every time the author hits “enter”, the latest line of text is added to the post. This is really neat.



• Pages can have different personalities. Each page in the blog can be associated with a separate style or template. There are currently 11 base styles.

Concerns about Bubbler
Here are my top concerns with the Bubbler offering:

• The rich client approach, while definitely having benefits in terms of richness and speed, ties the user to the computer on which the client is installed. Five Across needs to add Web browser authoring capabilities too.


• The user account and page naming approach is totally wrong. For the hosted version of Bubbler, every user shares a subdirectory called “home”, and another one called “pages”. Pages are assigned a unique number by the Bubbler server, or a user can give it a user friendly name. That’s a problem, since no two pages … across the entire population of users … can have an identical name. At the moment, I’m the only person who can have a page called “contactdetails”.


• There’s no RSS. Notification is by email or cell phone text only. RSS is critical.


• There is no automatic archiving of notes on pages into archives by month or by key word topic. If I used Bubbler for Shared Spaces, that would mean that I’d have a page with over 250 daily briefing entries. That doesn't work.


• There is not currently the capability to review site visitor statistics or the source of referrers. As a blog writer, I'm very interested in knowing who is coming and from where.


• Links to other web sites apply only to a given page, and can’t be shared across multiple pages. I think that’s a limitation, and there should be an option for having shared links.


• There’s no workflow capabilities, in terms of getting approval to post a page or new note. The press release refers to that, but perhaps I'm expecting more than Five Across intended.

Strategic Advice to Five Across
The Bubbler technology has a range of interesting ideas, as I’ve outlined above. However, there are some fairly serious problems with the architecture of the product today, as I’ve noted above too. These need to be addressed before any serious customer adoption could be contemplated.

Secondly, the balance between the Basic and Professional package needs more work. In particular, I suggest the following:

• The Basic product supports only a single author, whereas the Pro version supports multiple.


• The Basic product enables up to 3 blogs, whereas the Pro version is unlimited.


• Storage on the Pro version could be less. 1GB is a lot.


• Bandwidth on the Pro version needs to be increased. 3 GB of bandwidth for a current allocation of 1 GB of storage space is insufficient.


• The Pro version should permit domain name allocations, whereas the Basic edition doesn’t.

Strategic Advice to Potential Users and ISPs
Bubbler is interesting to try, has some fantastic features, but don’t bet the business on it yet. It will need to go through some major architectural revisions before being ready for prime time. ISPs, too, should hold off embracing it since the required architectural changes will impact their subscriber base.

Resources for further Investigations
Five Across press release on Bubbler
Bubbler home page
Bubbler Technology (see the Technology white paper too)
Bubbler Basic/Pro Feature Chart
Getting Started with Bubbler

What Do You Think?
Did I miss the boat? If you have tried Bubbler and have differing perspectives, then please drop me an email, or leave a comment below.

Comments

[Glenn Reid]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the Bubbler review. I have a few responses to some of the issues you raised.

- We will be building other front-end submission tools, including web
authoring, and will also be documenting our SXTP protocol to encourage
others to do the same. This is part of the reason it's being released
as a beta.

- The naming approach, which you call "totally wrong", is very much like
what everybody else does, such as TypePad. There is no other way to
do it. Either you have a unique number, or you don't. If you don't,
then you're in one large namespace. The thing that we don't do is to
give better examples of how to structure your custom naming, which can
be done through a directory-like naming scheme, which is how this
problem is solved in general (including on file systems). You could for
example set up a URL like http://bubbler.net/SharedSpaces/page2.html.
We perhaps should encourage users to choose a name as their "directory" that
we then use for page naming below that. I think it's just a matter
of illusion/user-interface and not a true techncial limitation. Note
that there is a bug right now that if you us "_" (underscore) in the
name of a custom URL it doesn't recognize it. This will be fixed
very shortly.

- We have RSS feeds in the works and it is almost done. Expect it within the
week. I agree that this is very important.

- We are working on a mechanism for rolling back archives but don't
have the user interface worked out yet. We're hoping that people
won't blog too quickly and get ahead of us. Since the pages are
dynamically generated this just "works" when we get the user interface
in place to make the choices of how to limit the text on the initial
page. There are many choices that are possible to offer (abbreviating
the text of each post, limiting total number by date or by count, etc).
We're trying to pick the right ones and present them in a good way.

- Reviewing site statistics is something we had not thought of and is
a good idea. I haven't seen this in other blogging engines but perhaps
I have not looked in the right places.

- For the workflow, we will shortly be bringing out a new version of
InterComm that is seamless stitched into Bubbler. They work on the
same network, with the same accounts, and if you grow into "Team"
blogging it works great. I think you'll like it. You can even just
"turn on" web page views of groups in InterComm for existing data,
so your communications and files in InterComm can become web
pages without any additional work on your part (this is off by default
in InterComm for obvious reasons).

Thanks for your comments. We will be working to improve Bubbler constantly and your feedback is very helpful. I don't believe that there are any "fairly serious problems with the architecture of the product today", rather features/refinements that can easily be added (or in some cases just revealed) without any rearchitecting. The architecture is in fact extremely flexible and powerful and can easily accomplish all of the things you suggest and more, some without even rebooting the server, since it's all dynamically generated content.

Glenn Reid
Founder/CEO
Five Across

[Michael Sampson]

Glenn, thanks for your responses. I've replied via a new post, as I wanted to show you the TypePad interface for viewing Visitor Stats. See http://www.shared-spaces.com/blog/2005/02/response_to_gle.html.