Zude, Check out my Swag!
by Benjamin Ross
I know you’ve been waiting for it. The blog just doesn’t cut it. Flicker and YouTube just aren’t diverse enough, and while Myspace is close, it’s mostly an illusion brought about by terrible design. No, what you really want is your very own online junk drawer. A place to store all of the cumulative digital detritus you have collected from your electronic journeys. Your wait is over. 5G inc. is introducing ZUDE.
Unfortunate naming aside, with ZUDE you can effectively gather all of your internet swag in one place. Got a Myspace page? Drag in into your Zude site. Notice I said ‘site,’ not page when referring to ZUDE. That is because unlike most of the other services I named, Zude allows you to build a complete ‘Web Presence’ as they call it. That is, a full, multi-page, interlinked site. So as I was saying, drag your Flicker page right into your Zude site and you’ll have Myspace sitting next to Flicker on the same webpage. No longer will you have to go to multiple sites to see all of your various social networks. Just place them next to each other in Zude and check them all at once.
Nearly any website, internet widget, image, video file, text, or file can be placed into Zude. You can even load images directly from your desktop; all of it via drag and drop.
Now, you may be thinking, “Wow, I can update everything from one source.” Not quite. You can put everything on one web page or within one site, but they are essentially interactive widgets containing the various pages. So, while you can put Myspace and Facebook right next to each other in Zude, you would still have to update them both independently. However, you could do so without leaving Zude.
What this really amounts to in my mind is an online desktop. After all of the speculation of why, in the future, we won’t need a local operating system, because everything we need will be online, this is the opening of the door. With Google’s apps and others allowing you to create and edit files online, Zude promises a place to let you bring everything together. It even works like a desktop, with most pieces in independent and movable windows.
Oh, and by the way, it’s all free.
Before you throw yourself out the window in either excitement or despair, let me mention a couple of details. First, the official launch for Zude is today (May 1, 2007). Yesterday was supposed to be a pre-launch for early applicants. However, I tried to get on for sometime and the server did not respond.
This leads to my two major concerns for this service. As with all social networking and Web 2.0 (I know, I’m sorry, don’t shoot me for using the term) companies, the first major hurdle is going to be adoption. Next is, of course, maintaining the servers, storage and bandwidth issues for so much intensely personal data. As the seemingly already challenged server illustrates, this can be a massive undertaking.
Want to check it out for yourself? Go to Zude.com.
