Glubble, a New and Safe Way for Your Kids to Play Online : Dad-O-Matic

Glubble, a New and Safe Way for Your Kids to Play Online

By iGoByDoc | Sep 23, 2008

Recently I came across a site called Glubble. Glubble is a FREE parental control system for the FireFox browser that once installed you can have complete control over your kids online browsing experience.

The system is geared for children up to the age of elementary school and may (in my opinion) be pushing it for 5th and 6th graders.

As a parent of now a 13 year old who is in junior high, I wish I would have had something like this system for my boys younger years as I always felt I was looking over his shoulder to see what he was doing online.

What Glubble does for their demographic is amazing. You simply install in your FireFox browser and create an account for each of your kids. When FireFox reboots you have Glubble installed and ready to go.

Glubble Screenshot

Glubble already has a wide variety of sites that have gone through their approval process such as Barbie, Lego and Disney sites. Glubble also gives you, as a parent, the ability to add sites that you approve of as well.

Another nice feature, if you walk away from your PC, your browser becomes password protected so your child can not just simply log in as you and start looking for additional content.

A few more features I like are the family messaging wall where you can chat with your kids and them with you, and you can also see the sites that your kids last visited. There is also a Google search engine in Glubble as well, but this is not your ordinary Google engine. It only displays results your kids are allowed to see.

So here are my pro’s and con’s to using Glubble.

Pro’s

Very easy to install
A lot of great content already available and it is simple to add or delete more sites
A system like this has been needed for some time
Most kids up to a certain age will find hours and hours of fun games, activities and learning

Con’s

Only available in FireFox. To me not a big deal as I use FireFox, but most of the world still uses IE and now Google Chrome is on the block. So families will have to make the switch to FireFox and nuke or hide IE so children do not have a “work around” to get to other content. So while the con is “only available for FireFox”, you can turn that into a pro and just get FireFox already if you do not have it. C’mon, you know you want it!
The Google results are few and far between… each search I tried gave me no results, however I am sure others may find this feature nice do to that very fact!

Bottom line, if you have kids in the house up to maybe 12 years old… go and get this now. If you have let your kids have free reign online they may find this as punishment or something as they are now in your approved universe, but at the end of the day there is a lot of content online that we need to protect our kids from, and Glubble does this job well!

On a side note, I think Glaxstar (the developers) are on to something here. I can see a service like this being used by a lot of businesses who want to keep their employees off the web and working. Management could allow only the sites they want their employees on. For all I know there may be something like this already available, but I am not sure if they are available in as slick of a setup as Glubble.

I give Glubble a 4 out of 5 stars.

Until next time…

Doc

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iGoByDoc

ron_miller

Hi:
Do you have a similar product that you could recommend for my soon to-be 13 year old? He knows I want to monitor, but I haven't figured out the best way to do it. If you or anyone else has any ideas, I would appreciate it.

And I can't use the OS controls in Vista because he needs to be the Admin to mess around with his games. Tried that one already. :)

Alexander van Elsas

Hi Doc, thank you for this nice review. Be aware that we are about to launch a complete new Glubble for Families service. It will contain many new and improved features.

Our Safe and fun kids environment is still available as a Firefox plugin. But Glubble For Families now comes with a complete new private Family Page providing exciting new activities for the whole family. The parental support features such as pre-aproving our huge Glubble web sites collections, and our Kids Monitor, are implemented on this Family Page. This page is accessible using any browser.

If anyone is interested we are open for preview. Simply register at our Glubble Parents community forum and you can download the software and give it a try.

The forum is located at: http://glubbleparents.ning.com

xadrian

This is a wonderful extension to have. Thus far I've had to leave our approved sites as link buttons up top on IE (my Firefox has so many link icons there's no way to let them use that...Fark anyone?) I will definitely play around with this. Thanks for the post.

doc

Alexander, thanks for the response. I will check out the new version and post an updated review soon.

Thanks,

Doc

Neil Vineberg

The new Glubble for Families is now downloadable at www.glubble.com. Features a new interface for parents and children, photo albums, family events, and a social network for the family (including cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.).

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