Glide Engage Challenges Twitter

TransMedia on Wednesday plans to tweak Twitter by introducing a new micro-blogging service called Glide Engage that takes Twitter's 140 character limit and multiplies it by a factor of 10.

TransMedia CEO Donald Leka has described the service as "Twitter with substance."

The service was supposed to launch in June.

Glide Engage is a free social messaging application that is integrated with the Glide OS suite of online apps, which includes Glide Email, Glide Groups, Glide Meeting, Glide Write, Glide Presenter and Glide Crunch. These browser-based applications can be used on Linux, Mac, or Windows computers, as well as many mobile phones.

Glide Engage allows users to post and read messages of up to 1400 characters that appear on the user's Glide profile page and to include links to other Web sites in posts.

Built atop the Glide OS rights management system, Glide Engage also offers the ability to share files stored in one's Glide account, including videos, music, and documents, without losing control over those files. Glide's rights-based permission system allows its users to protect both their content and their privacy though administrative security controls. As such, it's suitable for kids to use.

Leka likens Glide Engage to Google's forthcoming Wave communications application. Although Engage isn't an open, federated system like Wave and doesn't support real-time messaging, there are similarities in the way the two can be used for group collaboration. A more apt comparison might be Twitter, if Twitter supported longer messages and ran atop a social networking and cloud-based application layer.

Leka says that one of the advantages of Engage is that it is integrated with the rest of the Glide service, so that users don't have to juggle multiple applications to share files and interact.

The Glide service launched in late 2005 and just recently passed the million-user mark.

InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis on the state of enterprise storage. Download the report here (registration required).