I like StumbleUpon, the website recommendation engine that lets me click a button whenever I’d like to view a new, potentially interesting website. But for all the hours it has helped me waste, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it useful – pages that get recommended are rarely related to each other beyond a general category, so there’s never any logical train of thought.
San Francisco-based startup BuzzBox is looking to add some logic to the art of ’stumbling’ with its new Firefox plugin, Fast Forward. The service generates site recommendations based not only on their popularity, but also by the order in which they were viewed. For example, when I clicked the ‘Fast Forward’ button while reading about Twitter users reporting on the terror attacks in India, the service directed me towards the latest CNN coverage on today’s atrocities, as this was the page most frequently visited after reading the TechCrunch article.
To accomplish this feat, Fast Foward records and analyzes the anonymized browsing habits of its users. CTO Mike Prince assures me that all data is totally anonymous and that the service ignores any secure browsing (like banking or Email), but there are still a few possible issues. For one, users may be inadvertently directed to staging pages that are typically obfuscated (I actually managed to land on a BuzzBox alpha page by hitting Fast Forward from its homepage). Prince acknowledges that there are still some issues, explaining that it is still in an experimental stage. And if you do frequent sensitive sites, it’s easy to turn off tracking entirely.
While the plugin is for Firefox only at the moment, the company plans to have an Internet Explorer version available in the next few months. For now BuzzBox isn’t doing anything to monetize Fast Foward, but in the future the plugin may integrate unintrusive overlays at the top of some sites with small ads (Prince emphasizes that the plugin won’t be annoying).
I like Fast Forward – in my testing it was usually easy to tell why certain pages were being recommended, and while it may not always be as entertaining as StumbleUpon (because the recommendations are less varied), I find it much more useful. That said, the service will need to seriously ramp up its privacy settings, otherwise paranoia may keep its userbase small.
Thanks for the article Jason. We are very sensitive to the privacy concerns so we don’t ask users to register or give any personal information to use the FastForward Button. We’d love more feedback from you and the TechCrunch community.
Thanks
Anu
Google will “significantly” reduce its 10,000-odd contract workers worldwide, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The move may impact India where the search giant employs more than 1,000 people, primarily in Hyderabad and Bangalore.
A large portion of Google’s workforce in India is contracted out by “vendors” and does not show on its payroll.
“We have been thinking for some time, before the acute phase of the economic crisis, about significantly reducing the number of contract workers,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Google spokesperson Jane Penner as saying.
Cool. How do they make money?
Money is overrated. Ask Linus.
#1- Sell user data
#2- Insert relevant ads once enough usage allows for some sort of relevance tracking (which will probably drive users away)
BuzzBox needs to make money to be a viable company, we are going to go down the #2 path of having some type of advertising. The key is “how do we be like Google?” and make it relevant and non-intrusive?
We have ideas that we will implement and ask users for feedback on which idea is ok. But if the TC community has ideas we would really like to hear it.
Anu
CEO, BuzzBox.com
anu@buzzbox.com
Seems that there has to be some upper limit to the effectiveness. Good crowdsourced recommendations encourage more people to FF, leading to less crowd to source…
It’d be an extremely lazy crowd who exclusively used the FF button, I doubt that’d be a serious concern.
Neat idea. Love the implementation as well.
Buzzbox is cool. Congratulations to Anu and Mike for a neat product.
I’m a fan. Kudos.
Oh btw
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It’s fun when you try it on something like Facebook and then it fast forwards to some people’s pictures you don’t know. Also, might there be some way to game this? If I had all my friends go from Facebook to a viagra site or something, would people start following (and thus reinforcing that move)?
We know as we get more traffic and become more successful, it will drive people to game the system. We have some smart team members and advisers who have thought of this and we are monitoring “abnormalities” that will jump out to us. But our community will have to get involved and give us feedback when something occurs. In any community site, the community is the best police.
Anu
CEO, BuzzBox.com
anu@buzzbox.com
Oops, it seems it does NOT work as expected. Usually I can NOT find the content I interested in
I too liked Buzzbox. nice product!!
Liked it
awesome idea!! the implementation is neat!
Nice work. I found Stumbleupon to be fun but an enormous time waster. Great for finding one-off sites that give you that “aaah, cool” factor, but you quickly forget about them and never return again.
This one actually leads me to the next natural step as determined by the crowd. Look forward to seeing how they build this out.
Thanks for all the great comments back and we are really glad you like the product. Please give us feedback and spread the word about us.
When you are in a startup and you launch, the comments people give really matter to us. Thanks again and we hope to hear more from you.
Anu
CEO, BuzzBox.com
anu@buzzbox.com
Hey guys & Michael A. There is a news for all to consider:
“Google will “significantly” reduce its 10,000-odd contract workers worldwide, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The move may impact India where the search giant employs more than 1,000 people, primarily in Hyderabad and Bangalore.
A large portion of Google’s workforce in India is contracted out by “vendors” and does not show on its payroll.
“We have been thinking for some time, before the acute phase of the economic crisis, about significantly reducing the number of contract workers,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Google spokesperson Jane Penner as saying.
This is definitely interesting but I have always wondered if this can be the way of browsing for most users who are strapped for time and it may not be worth waiting to see if the next page FF brings up is useful or relevant. Search is just a lot better right now, though not perfect. I think a combination of FF and Search might be more interesting.
I think you are exactly right that (directed) search and browsing for entertainment like Fast Forward are solving different problems and can very happily co-exist.
For the current version of the product, I wouldn’t classify it as a time saver and thus it doesn’t fit into the toolbox for people who are strapped for time. Instead it serves up a strong dose of serendipity for those with a minute to spare – and in my testing this casual distraction proves very effective at stealing away more than the allotted few minutes.
It’s funny how surprisingly similar this looks to our Youlicit More button. You should definitely try our search enhancement if you like this concept: http://www.youl...t.com/download/
Good to see more people going in this direction.