Y Combinator-funded Socialbrowse has just launched in private beta. The service could best be described as a Twitter for links, but with a few unique twists that could make it an essential tool for web browsers. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to go here will get invites to the private beta, which is currently available as a Firefox-only extension.
To distribute links, Socialbrowse uses a “Follow” system that will be familiar to anyone that has used Twitter. Members can choose which users they’d like to receive updates from by “following” them, and all updates are mass-broadcasted to a user’s followers. Each received link can be displayed as part of “social feed” in a browser sidebar, or as a temporary notification message. To help keep link feeds flowing, members can choose to automatically follow the most prominent link sharers in topics that include technology, entertainment, and news.
Twitteresque link-sharing is nice, but Socialbrowse’s real value comes from the nifty icons that it embeds across the web. Every time a member shares a link, the system will embed a miniature version of their profile icon next to the link on the page itself, which is visible to all of that member’s followers (see image). It sounds intrusive at first, but in practice it is extremely useful, especially on link-heavy sites like CNN or Techmeme.
Now, instead of having to rely on link aggregators like Digg, users can browse the web as they normally would, using their friends’ icons to help single out the most interesting stories. Alternatively, users can head to Socialbrowse’s site, which tabulates the most shared links in order of popularity.
Socialbrowse is certainly promising, but it still has a few issues to clear up. Users are currently unable to leave a comment or description when they share a link, which can be confusing when a URL’s title is ambiguous. The site’s homepage is also badly in need of a redesign, or at least a color change.
Socialbrowse will see competition from a number of similar message broadcasting companies, which include Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, though none of these are focused solely on links. Socialbrowse was developed by the creators of 8aweek, whch we reviewed last February. 8aweek is still active, but CEO Zack Garbow says it has been placed on the backburner for the time being.
Cool, thanks for the info^^
anybody got a link to their revenue model?
Looks very interesting, but wish the article here had mentioned that it is a Firefox based system. Signed up for the beta anyway.
The post says it is Firefox-only…
The company does plan to expand to other browsers in the future though.
btw, it is a bookmarklet after all?
MA thinks this is a good company to cover, i guess… anything about YC
with techcrunch anything social has the “potential to be big”
seesmic = twitter for videos
blip.fm = twitter for music
socialbrowse = twitter for links
… coming soon twitter for (dog)food, twitter for baseball, twitter for dating…
I know what I am going to do next:
Hypertwitter.com = twitter for [u name it] twitters.
Psst: Domain is available, go grab it
Sounds good but, I found http://www.keepsy.com, no need for useless extensions, works in multiple browsers, just uses a simple bookmarklet. It seems that its in development still but it works just fine, I’ve been using it for the past couple of months!
This is kinda like Stumbleupon but with more control on, from whom do you want to accept and visit new links. Also instead of subscribing to categories …..you subscribe to users.
Doesn’t seem much like Twitter to me — in any case Twitter is about the people, so until people show up there it’s like an empty place with no people in it. Even so I gave them my email address and of course I wonder what their API looks like.
completely pointless. download was a waste of 10 seconds of my life
sounds like a less useful version of stumbleupon?
I’m starting a startup that can be summed up as: twitter for twitter.
PS: YCombinator is funding silly stuff… fads.
I like it so far, could see this being useful. I’ll definitely leave it installed for a while. Its really not like SU, because you can choose the links you want to see.
Curious to see if these in-page icons play well with the various designs of the internet. Could get quite annoying if not.
Dave, I’m in favor of a Twitter for Twitter. Why no one will compete with them head-on is a mystery to me. Conclusion is that the tech industyr has gone chicken-shit.
how the fvck is this different from RSS feeds! To borrow a quote from nytimes: “deeply shallow”
“download was a waste of 10 seconds of my life”
wow. that’s a pretty good putdown!
@Dave Winer: I think you’re right! Jaiku provided them with some competition but after they were swallowed by Google, they died a slow death.
As for Twitter for Twitter, I think that’s the most sensible “Twitter for *” considering how crappy Twitter’s execution has been so far.
Hmmm this could be quite useful, especially if popular people starts using it. Twitter won’t be nearly as interesting with Scobleizer etc right, so thats exactly the kind of folks these guys need.
Hope the company invests more in hosting, especially when it doesn’t work like it is now.
The server at http://www.socialbrowse.com is taking too long to respond.
The requested site did not respond to a connection request and the browser has stopped waiting for a reply.
* Could the server be experiencing high demand or a temporary outage? Perhaps they were featured on TechCrunch? Try again later.
Hello everybody:
I have prepared for you the presentation with “10 Fundamental Lacks of Social Networking Business”
If you have time, please follow for ling to check it:
http://www.slideshare.net/ishm.....20-461604/
How it is different than FriendFeed.com’s browser based “Share on FriendFeed” feature? I dont know why it can be so big especially if FriendFeed provides such a great conversation platform…
Well, the claim of a 9 second install is bogus. I had to “allow” Firefox 4 times to install it before getting past “…waiting”
Not a good first experience. Shades of twitter. Which isn’t a positive right now.
Let’s see if it was worth it.
Cool…checking it out.
techcrunch writers love Obama, he seems so show up in all of their posts.
I had fun with it for about ten minutes. I will probably delete tomorrow.
Very interesting. I’m not sure if I’m getting it right. But wouldn’t these appended avatars distort the layout/alignment of some websites?
Veron, in my experience it does distort them a little, but it has never made a site difficult to navigate.
I signed up, got an invite, downloaded the firefox addon, then immediately uninstalled it because of the additional toolbar buttons, popups, etc. Seriously, I have a 24″ display and I barely have enough space to fit in the default toolbar icons… When will developers stop stuffing toolbar icons/taskbar icons down our throats?
remember YC fund people not projects. most projects are just hacker projects that might turn into something later on.
I don’t actually see why these things need funding to get this far to be honest.
Just finished submitting a bunch of stuff, and now my data is gone, and getting sql errors. Uh-oh.
What a horrendous website! Slow and loses data!
FAIL!
Does anyone else have Firefox Add-on Fatigue? And Add-on too far. The Add-on that broke the browser’s back?
Don’t’ we have enough twitters and firefox extensions? FAIL!!
Well, I send my friends either a simple link, or an iMacros bookmark (aka social scripting). That works well.
http://forum.iopus.com/viewtop.....amp;t=3201
Very useful. Takes no effort to share a link.
As mentioned earlier by Jim (wow we have followers!?!), our app Keepsy is designed to be the Twitter of links.
It doesn’t have any fancy stuff like this, it just allows you to add links using a bookmarklet and they get added to your feed. You can also ‘follow’ other people and can view a Facebook-newsfeed-stylee list of these.
If you don’t fancy checking the site all the time (I don’t really fancy being responsible for a huge drop in productivity as has happened since Twitter arrived!) we also have RSS and Atom feeds.
You can checkout my keepsy feed at http://luca.keepsy.com/
I wonder how long it’ll be before Twitter and Social Networks For Everything fads die out..
@gilltots
Who needs a revenue model? Revenue is so last century…
Internet bubble 2.0 here we come.
Reply to Darren. “remember YC fund people not projects. most projects are just hacker projects that might turn into something later on.”
Agree completely but see value in what y combinator does for its companies. They give little actual seed money ($5k plus another $5K for each founder). Essentially, they are just giving you three months of pocket money to finish your prototype (get to beta). With the prototype, Y combinator then presents your project to venture capital. What does the startup get out of it? They get the seal of approval of Y combinator plus entrees to VC …. which is huge!
If anybody wants to apply for the next round at y combinator, here is the link for winter 2009:
http://ycombinator.com/w2009.html