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Glide's Mobile Engage

Come mid-June, New York-based social media company TransMedia plans to enhance its Glide media-sharing platform with a new microblogging service called Engage.

Company CEO Donald Leka describes it as "Twitter with substance."

Glide is a media-sharing, communications, productivity, and file-storage service that runs on popular Web browsers using Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and on dozens of mobile devices. The social networking tool merges the concept of cloud computing with desktop computing by synchronizing local files with remote copies on Glide's servers.

Launched at the end of 2005, Glide just recently surpassed the million-user mark, thanks partly to a deal with Time Warner Cable last October to make the media-sharing service available to the cable company's Road Runner Internet customers.

About 35% of Glide subscribers use the service mostly for mobile communications. "Mobility is good for us right now," said Leka.

Engage extends Glide's rights-based file-sharing system to Twitter-style micro-blogging, allowing users to post links to personal files and to specify viewing or editing rights. Thanks to Glide's bidirectional syncing capabilities, changes made to posted files get replicated to the appropriate desktop copies of those files.

Engagements, as Glide calls these sequences of posts, can be archived as Adobe PDF, Glide Write, or Microsoft Word documents.

In contrast to Twitter's 140-character limit, Engage allows up to 1,400 characters. And if that's not enough, Glide documents can be inserted into Engagements.

Engage users can invite those who aren't Glide subscribers to participate in their Engagements via e-mail. Engagements can be public or private and are searchable.

TransMedia aims to release Engage for Android phones on June 15, with iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile compatibility coming a few weeks later.

According to Leka, Engage is also being made available as a white-label service that can be branded and deployed by partners.

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