The last couple of days some users reported issues with getting into Glubble. We’ve tracked down the issue to a change we made in caching an API call. The caching worked fine for some users, but not for all.

Good news is: we’ve fixed the issue.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused (we know that for many children Glubble is a favorite toy, and broken toys are no fun!

We’re very happy to announce that Glubble is among the winners of the Next Web Awards.

More than 126,000 people around the world have cast their votes the last couple of months for 7 Next Web Award categories. Glubble has won in the “Rookie of the Year” category.

Photos of the event are here and here.

It’s good to see the “web 2.0 crowd” has so many supporters for a Web that’s also fun for kids!

We are super pleased to announce today, Glubble has been included in the top Firefox recommended Add-ons list

Developed for Firefox by Glaxstar, developers of Firefox add-ons for blue chip companies including the official eBay companion and the Yahoo! del.icio.us add-ons. Glubble is a parental control suite for Firefox enabling children to seamlessly link-up online with their family members to browse and search (via Google) a personal web made of bubbles of content called, Glubbles.

The family social network gets to choose, add and grow what their children are allowed to see online while having fun with a ‘facebook for families’ style browser start page. In short parental control just went 2.0 and fun!

Glubble founder, Ian Hayward said of the milestone, “We are really proud that Glubble has been added to the top recommended list of Firefox add-ons. This early recognition will help boost our mission to enable families to provide the best web experience for kids aged 3-12. We believe children should experience an Internet that is free, fun and open for families to control, not censors. Glubble delivers all this for free built on the best web browser on the market, Mozilla Firefox”

Glubble for Firefox runs on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Anyone with a young family member is encouraged to download the Glubble add-on for Firefox here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/588

The award winning Firefox web browser is available for free from the Mozilla corporation here www.getfirefox.com

As many of you may know, Mozilla is about to launch the latest version of their browser, Firefox 3. This version will be released very soon.

There is a known issue regarding the children “Favorite” thumbnails in Firefox 3. In the current Firefox version (Firefox 2), when a child added a web page containing Flash objects to her favorites, a thumbnail was generated and placed in the favorites toolbar. However, in Firefox 3, while this feature remains available, the Flash objects contained in the web page are not displayed in the thumbnail image. The same bug affects Glubble when running on Firefox 2 in Mac OS X.

This issue is due to changes in a few Firefox 3 libraries Glubble uses to create the thumbnails. We have confirmed that several other extensions are dealing with the same problem. Rest assured that we are working on finding a solution as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

Again we’re experiencing a server outage, caused by a major issue at our hosting provider Engineyard.

A little bit of background: Glubble runs on a so-called cluster, a super computer farm with many servers that take care of storing your data, serving your family home page and allowing your children to safely surf the web — alas, not today.

One of the benefits of running on a cluster is failover: if one part fails, another part takes over. However, as it seems now, the complete cluster is down.

What is happening right now (I’m quoting Ian Hayward here, our company founder) is comparable to being hit by a meteor, getting up on your feet and being struck by lightning again as a bonus.

We decided to go with Engineyard for our hosting because they’re one of the few companies who offer this kind of advanced infrastructure, especially tailored for the technology employed by us (Ruby on Rails, a popular web framework).

Up to yesterday they did a marvelous job with excellent customer support. I’m sure they will continue to offer a good service, and probably come up with a detailed explanation why things have gone so horribly wrong but all this doesn’t help us now: if our servers are down, we’re letting you down.

We’ll have to sit this one through, and when everything is up and running again decide what we can do to prevent this from happening again.

Apologies,

Erik van Eykelen

VP Technology & Engineering

We’re experiencing an outage on the Glubble servers. Our hosting provider has solved the issue and is currently bringing the servers back online, however this may take a few more minutes.

Because the servers are inaccessible, your children will not be able to login to their home page and surf Glubbles. Also, helpers will not be able to access their family homepage.

Please note that Glubbles safety features for children also work “offline”.

We’re terribly sorry, and are doing our utmost best to solve this issue as quickly as possible.

We’re still beavering away here developing Glubble each and every day and pretty pleased to say that feedback is looking really good so far. Great to see that both parents and kids are equally enjoying using Glubble.

I thought I’d mention that we are all pledging to ourselves here at Glubble to start communicating with the world a little better now that we have the first couple of months of proper live 1.0 product use under our belt. Life has been a little too “heads-down” to be honest in our 23 people strong team, our focus has been spent on the product (as it should be) but we are now ready to start to scale up and help even more families with youngsters on the web.

I thought you may like to share some of our early adoption numbers with us.

We currently have 7358 children actively using Glubble with their families and 21,574 downloads, we think this is fantastic all by word of mouth, thank you! Its really rewarding to know families are using Glubble to enable their youngsters to have a better web browsing experience with Firefox each and every day.

Here’s some numbers on web site links added by families for their own children.

Families have added a total of 23,365 new web sites into their own glubbles! Families have also chosen to remove a total of 4871 links out of their pre-installed glubbles too, proving that families really can decide for themselves what is best for their kids online! We love it, this is what Glubble is all about.

News just in today, we’ve been told that Glubble has been nominated as Rookie of the year for “The Next Web awards in Europe on 4th April, this is really great awareness already and we would be gratefull of you would like to help show your appreciation and vote for us (no registration needed) by clicking on the ‘vote for glubble’ on this page, http://awards.thenextweb.org/votes/add/333

We are also asking anyone with a social network to post this on blogs, twitter, facebook, pownce etc…

Vote for Glubble as rookie of the year at The Next Web awards - http://tinyurl.com/2z68qj  and help give young kids a better web!

That’s all for now on this Friday, thanks for helping us, help you, help kids online!

Today we launch the 1.0 final version of Glubble a new parental control suite for the Firefox web browser.

We call it, “Glubble Family Edition”, it’s a totally reworked version that looks completely different to the beta that 40,000 people have been helping us test since summer 2007.

If you’re one of the 40,000 families that has helped test drive the beta version, thank you! It’s now time to throw away your old version and upgrade to the new final 1.0 Glubble Family Edition today.

We have a call to action for you please: If you appreciate using Firefox then we ask you to tell every family you know that has a primary age child, to “Get Firefox” and install the “Glubble Family Edition Add-on” in order to experience a whole new and fun way to provide parental control for elementary school age children.

Our mission now is to empower as many parents as possible to take back control of the web for their young ones with Glubble, while helping to further promote the adoption of the Firefox web browser.

Parents let us they love the new 1.0 final version of Glubble, please go check it out today!

Ian Hayward, Founder.

Following on from our December blog post, its about time we updated everyone on the progress we’ve been making on finalizing the 1.0 version of Glubble Add-on for Firefox. We took time over December to make final polishing and we are in the final testing phase this month.

To explain, we’ve been actively engaged since the summer of 2007 on support via email and in our help forums with thousands of people who have kindly helped us shape and build a better product with suggestions and advice, we really do appreciate everyones support who has helped us build a better web experience for our children. Thank you.

In fact, since July 2007 over 40,000 people just like us have downloaded Glubble Beta and taken it for a test drive with their children and families, with everyones help I do believe we have a final version that is set to provide a super-fun experience for families.

For this reason, I think you will discover that the next version of Glubble is a huge improvement from our proof-of-concept beta. We are calling the finished version “Glubble Family Edition”. While still focussing on providing a protected fun world of discovery for elementary age children you will also find it a super experience for your whole extended family to participate in your little loved ones experiences on line.

So again, thank you for your help and support, have a great new year and we look forward to sharing Glubble Family Edition with you this month in January!

Kindest regards,
Ian Hayward, Founder Glubble.

We will be publicizing the exact date for the final 1.0 launch version of Glubble next week, we expect it to arrive around the middle of December if user testing continues to go well.

Some of you will be receiving emails from us this coming Friday to invite you to preview it before launch and help with internal testing.

We are super pleased with the mountains of improvement we’ve been able to achieve based on all the user feedback, kind suggestions and comments and we are looking forward to everyone getting Glubble 1.0 in their hands.

Looking foward to the feedback folks.

All the best,

Ian Hayward, Founder Glubble.