TooblaSay it five times fast. Tooblatooblatooblatooblatoobla. There, that was easy wasn’t it. No? It wasn’t easy, you say? Well, repeating the memorable name is the hardest part about using this nifty new visual bookmarking/content sharing web site whose public beta comes to you September 14, straight outta my home town in the heart of “Sili-Corn Valley”—Columbus, OH.
Toobla.com, initially at least, has two main functions: collecting linked content and sharing it with others, visually. In my brief beta test of the site it accomplishes these tasks very well. I know what you are thinking…whoop-dee-doo, there are a million ways to share content these days, right? Probably too many? (YALST—yet another link sharing tool). There most definitely are, but Toobla has a bit of a different paradigm for organizing collected content and it’s worth mentioning it twice—it collects content visually.
Note: Toobla was in the DemoPit of TC50 in 2008
Although somewhat similar to visual book-marker Evernote and visual browser Cooliris, Toobla is simpler conceptually in that there is very little set up required at an account level in order to get started. It is intuitive—you look at the site and just know what to do. I think this is because it uses a familiar “folder” motif for saving thumbnails of web content (whole pages, individual movie clips, links, images). Once collected, you can then share whole folders of content with others, via shortened URL, or by embedding the folder into any website as a widget. The quick, casual nature of this collection method is facilitated through the site’s convenient “bookmarklet” that is a cinch for working quickly and I think that must be Toobla’s main advantage—it really makes it easy to “bookmark first, evaluate later”. That works well for a person like me (who keeps everything of recent importance on the computer desktop).
You can share all sorts of things including little Flash games, widgets, and multimedia. Think of it as an embeddable locker of sorts.
But don’t take my word for it; give it a try! Toobla has made pre-launch accounts available for 1000 lucky CrunchGear/TechCrunch readers. Get signed up by clicking here.
But there is more planned for the public beta launch like implementing Facebook Connect technology and tight integration with Facebook’s activity feed. The service is already integrated with twitter. But there are still even more plans that we will come back to in the near future as I think these guys are really onto something! Stay tuned.
Toobla consists of founder Jake Saxbe, CEO and former Digg VP Brian Link, lead developer Matt Yoho, developer Mike Busch and intern developer Tony Schneider.
By the way, here is a folder of content I have shared as a widget. You can see how a Toobla folder can be a quick snapshot, representing whatever online content you are thinking about at a specific time. In my case it was The Pixies among other things. I noticed a few issues with the widget pop up window (*update – namely that it is not really working right now), but its important to note, this is still in beta. You can see the promise of the technology.
I am bothered their email confirmation displayed my password. How can they not encrypt their passwords? Big no no to storing plain text PW’s, can be sniffed
Seems like a good idea but not worth my info being stored insecurely who-knows-where.
Just because the email confirmation had your password in it does not mean it is being stored as plain text on their servers. it just means their email script grabbed that variable from the form and tossed it into the message being sent to your email address on account creation. Now, if they can tell you your exact password if you say you forgot it, then there is an issue with how they are storing it.
Thanks Jeff. I hope that is the case.
However, it is still weird to have my email emailed to me. I deleted the email but what if I didn’t and someone got access to my email and looked for other passwords I used?
Isn’t that how the Twitter employees info got compromised? The hacker searched her email for registration emails that displayed a password and lucky for him, found a PW she used for her twitter Google Apps acct.
Almost all online sites and services do it that way. You sign up and they send your log-in information to your email address.
No they don’t. I haven’t seen my password in my email in a very long time.
Rose, let me assure you – your password is NOT being stored in plain text in Toobla’s database. We’re using a one-way hashing method to encrypt/store passwords. There is no way for an attacker to get your unencrypted password from our database if we were to be compromised.
There are obviously still problems with sending passwords in plain text via email, and we’ll be addressing those issues for the public release in September.
Thanks for checking us out and giving us your feedback.
Umm, what about mail logs that show the mail text that was sent out? If you were hacked, the attackers would have access to this information and all the passwords.
Thanks for your comment (and email).
FWIW, if a “regular” user (Not code monkey) sees their PW displayed they might think the same (That it’s not being stored securely). I wasn’t familiar with the one-way hashing method.
Will explore Toobla again.
@Artem
True.
@Artem you’re correct. we pushed a fix for account activation emails (typical activation links instead of passwords) this afternoon. we’ll take a look at cleaning up the plain text passwords from the mail logs, too. We’re committed to keeping account information as secure as possible, and we definitely recognize that there’s a lot we can still do.
Site is too sluggish for my taste.
Some nice design, but the user interaction is really clunky. It took a while before it was obvious that the folder display element was overlaid. So I kept clicking the huge arrows in an effort to cycle through content in the folder. The tutorial didn’t allow me to do any of the things it was suggesting so I had to remember it all and then try it. So I’ve had to open the tutorial twice so far just to get the bookmarklet installed and figure out how to subscribe to people. Which I still haven’t figured out….
There’s no obvious search functionality so this is going to be a little too limiting from my perspective. Delicious might not give me pretty pictures but it’s pretty straight forward and easy to find new and interesting content.
Rescaled full sized images instead of thumbnails? Are you kidding me?
150KB image rescaled in the browser to be shown at 20% of its size, yet still using all the bandwidth of the larger image and the ugliness of live rescaling?
Throw 12 of them on a page and suddenly I have to download 1-2 megs of images? And you have to waste bandwidth serving them. Come on.
@Artem there’s a lot of polishing left to be done – performance improvements, like this, are definitely toward the top of our list. We’ll hopefully address this in the September public beta opening. Thanks again for your input, this is exactly why we’ve opened our site privately to TechCrunch users.
funny, but i don’t remember any farms or corn when I lived in Columbus…
When you lived there did you drive 25 minutes in any direction ever?
Looks like there’s an issue on older versions of FireFox – see screenshot:
http://twitpic.com/er7c4
Might want to set wmode=transparent on the SWF. Also, I’d suggest using en <embed> within your object. Oh, and the modal dialog isn’t working (getting JS errors) in IE7 when I click on a thumbnail.
Work on polishing it up and it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. As a fellow Ohio startup I’m rooting for ya!
Content of individual folders does not load for me in Chrome. It pops up the dialogue with the spinning icon but nothing happens.
Are other people using Chrome having this issue?
Yes, same problem for me.
Thanks for the feedback. We’re working on a fix to the Google Chrome issue.
Ill be honest, when I saw this at the BTC (TechColumbus), I thought it was sorta old hat but glad you guys are getting props.
Congrats!