Not Your Usual Old-Age Homepage
Are you getting the picture yet? Well, SeniorGlobe certainly is. Established three years ago, according to its online mission statement, "SeniorGlobe.com exists to provide those ages 55 and over the best possible community services and information resources that the web has to offer, for little or no charge." Their pages play host to an on-line community with forums, e-mail, connectivity, computer support, and free home web pages for seniors. They also put up articles written by members. Their mottos is, "By seniors, for seniors, about seniors, this place is ours!"
The Deal
If you stick to their basic service -- consider it an early bird special √ SeniorGlobe is a good deal, but if you're tempted by the ala carte menu, you're going to build up a considerable tab. Spam filtering is another $1.50 a month and if you think Tom Jones was risqué, you're going to need to spend $5 a month to get a web content filter.
Put your Dialup on Geritol
Propel is a hot little windows only product that improves download speed by a factor of anywhere from two to five times. It will reportedly work with most dialup services. (Called the real deal by several tech reviewers, I intend to look at Propel despite the Mac snub -- in a column sometime in the next week.)
SeniorGlobe is stingy with mailboxes (especially considering or maybe because the top reason that seniors use the net is for email), just one per customer, although you can order extras for a buck a month. The boxes are POP3 as well as web accessible. Recognizing people's sensitivity, user addresses are user@ ezsg.com rather than oldfogey@senior.com.
They offer 24hour support, some pretty good instruction, and FAQ pages, all in a type that's large enough to keep me out of bifocals for another year or so. In their basic service they also include 10MB of FTP storage and 50MB of webspace to build your own Grey Panther chapter. And yes, they are Mac compatible.
Good Deal If Your Needs Are Most Basic
In an effort to compare apples to apples when you add extra mailboxes along with spam and web filtering you end up with a setup that is actually just as pricey as AOL and Earthlink, and without the virus protection. They also have an okay start page, but if staying abreast of things elderly is important to you, SeniorNet.org offers a far superior start page (although no ISP service). All considered there are better deals, but out of respect for my elders (thank god I can still say that), and in consideration of finding no significant problems, I give these folks three thumbs up.