TxtBear – A New Way To Share Documents (Or Not)
Written by Alan Sunday, 22 August 2010 08:00
TxtBear is a very interesting new site that allows the sharing of documents, both publicly and privately. They bill themselves as “The Swiss Army Knife for documents”.
At the moment the site has no ads and is free to use, so, as with many new sites, I don’t know revenue model. I assume they are hoping one will emerge as they become established. It seems that a charge for extra storage or a “pro” model would be the logical way it will head, but that is just my speculation.
This is one I was anxious to try out. It seemed like a scaled down version of Dropbox (our review) or Drop.io (our review). There wasn’t a mention of requiring a sign-up, file size restrictions, storage space restrictions, or any of the other stipulations involved in Dropbox and Drop.io. It’s hard to tell though, since when I clicked on the FAQ to was presented with a blank page!
So, let’s get started using TxtBear. I thought I’d try it out with a simple word document that contained no personal information whatsoever.
On the main page of the site there are two radio-button options – Private and Public. Below that there is Browse option so that you can locate the document on your PC that you want to share, and of course, the Upload button.
After choosing Private and locating the file in my PC’s My Documents folder it turned out that I didn’t need to click the Upload button – it started right away.
When it completed it took me to screen that resembled a PDF document (a simple weekly calendar) displayed via the web. There are options for such thing as search, view (zoom in and out), page through documents (if you have uploaded multiple documents) and, on the far left, share. The share option allows you to share via Facebook, Twitter and many more options.
(the Share button is highlighted in red in this view)
I chose email and figured I would send a copy to my wife. It seems I missed the part where a sign-up was necessary. The box that popped up informed me that when I entered my email address and password I would automatically be registered. That’s fine, since I expected to have to sign up, back at the beginning of this test.
I really didn’t want to share in Facebook or Twitter, since this was just a test. But my email attempts failed. The URL to my document, which was put in automatically by TxtBear, kept giving the message “Error: Bad URL”. I tried switching the URL to the automatically created txt.li short URL, but that resulted in the same error message. The Word file is a .doc, which in on the list of supported files.
I decided I would give it one more shot, with a differently named copy of the same file. I received the same Error message regarding a bad URL.
When I returned to my email account I found a a message from them that I needed to click to confirm my address – standard procedure, except that the email gave my user name and PASSWORD in CLEAR TEXT! Maybe not a huge deal, given that my email is over https, but it’s still not what I want to see. After confirming my sign-up I returned to the web site and now had my user name and log out option at the top of the page.
There is, incidentally, no way visible to get back to previously uploaded files.
It seems this site needs some work. I didn’t test the other sharing methods, but Email was a fail. Maybe it was a temporary system problem that just happened to occur at the wrong time, but I doubt I will be back to try again. There are other services I can use, so I really don’t need to spend time playing with one that doesn’t seem to be quite ready. I guess the Beta tag wasn’t a joke here, in fact maybe it should be Alpha.
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