SocialBrowse: Do we really need another link sharing app ?
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 9:42 pm. 6 comments
Last week I joined Social Browse, another web 2.0 service aiming to be the Twitter for links (see Techcrunch post here) . My profile page on SocialBrowse is here, but you may not be able to access it if you are not in the beta.
SocialBrowse seems an interesting idea but the question is, is it good enough for people to get off the other systems that they use to share links. Just for kicks, I want to talk about the services that I use quite a bit.
First of all, there in my mind there is a clear difference between links I want to archive and go back to later vs. links that I send to friends. There may be overlap but not that often. I primarily use del.icio.us to save links important to me. I used to use google browser sync for Firefox but at some point Firefox 2 started becoming annoyingly slow enough for me to switch loyalties for Safari. Though that moment was brief, and I absolutely love Firefox 3 so far, that did make me use a non-browser-specific app like del.icio.us a little more seriously. Good timing too, since Google has officially declared they will no longer be supporting BrowserSync.
Del.icio.us does have a way to share links with your friends using the for:friendname syntax. However this starts cluttering up my account pretty fast. Especially since my shared links are just silly videos and stuff. Not something I care too much about a week from the day of posting.
As a Twitter user, I follow a lot of links that float around in conversations. They work for the most part. A while back I got into Pownce and I really liked it, it had a pretty clean and well designed interface and came with an Adobe Air app that was pretty well done. For some reason, most of my designer friends gravitated towards Pownce and the developers towards Twitter. But even on Pownce, we never exchanged status updates (well a few did but they were ignored). For the most part, Pownce became a design oriented link share for us. I think the inline image/video previews may have a lot to do with that. But more people got on Twitter and these days my Pownce stream is not that busy. Still the links there are worth archiving, since, well they look so good ;).
Another way I share interesting links is via Digg. Although Digg has a social network feature as well where you can form communities, I do not have enough friends there. But, the way I share links via Digg is a little more convoluted. The links I share there are picked up by different social stream aggregators like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed and Facebook. The followup conversations usually happen on those networks.
I was pretty enthusiastic about SocialBrowse. I was really hoping it would be better than Pownce, since for one thing, it would keep the status update chatter out of the link sharing. Some things are really cool. The browser plugin for Firefox brings up updates on the bottom right edge everytime someone I follow posts a link.
There is also a sidebar that brings the linkstream right there, so I dont have to navigate to the site. And tagging links within a small set of available tags make it very easy to find other links within a domain.
The most interesting feature of the browser integration is annotation of google search results web pages with icons of users who have shared that link. That I can see getting pretty useful to filter the more interesting links from others.
But I am not a big fan of the design, its too minimalistic with an unappealing color combination. There is no capability to comment on links shared which is such an obvious interaction. The only communication channel you have available is via email (using a mailto: link, not even an inline form). For a link sharing app not to have comments seems ridiculous. SocialBrowse also doesnt allow you to rate a link. With so many links being shared I would love to be able to filter out only the highest rated in my social circle. Another pet peeve for me is the url for user profiles are ugly and therefore non-intuitive. For example my profile’s url is: http://socialbrowse.com/profile/view/927/. It should be something like socialbrowse.com/arpit or socialbrowse.com/users/arpit.
Either way, I will give SocialBrowse a shot over the next few weeks, maybe there are cool things there that I havent found yet. But again, like most social networks, the value of SocialBrowse is dependent on how many of my friends get on it and right now there are none. I have about 5 invites left to hand out so drop me a comment if you need one.
Related links:
My delicious links
Follow me on Pownce
Shareaholic Firefox plugin
Mento: Another link share site
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I’m one of the Socialbrowse founders. We’re glad you tried out our tool and appreciate your feedback via the blog post!
Let me address a few things:
1) You’re right about a commenting system: it’s critical! We’re actually working on it right now, but we didn’t want that to hold us back from getting some users on the system so we could better understand how people would want to use comments.
2) The embedded user icons actually work everywhere on the web - not just Google results. So any page you go to you’ll see if there’s a shared link on that page!
3) You’re right, by default the profile access is a bit ugly using the user id, but there’s a good reason for this: since we don’t require user registration, we don’t necessary ever know your name! However, if you go into your profile and provide a username, you can then share your profile information publicly using a much cleaner URL.
4) While it is fun to have people you know on Socialbrowse with you, we built the system so that it can be just as useful even if you don’t know anyone else on it. We encourage users to follow lots of people with similar interests, and if you do, you’ll see a constant stream of interesting and relevant links in your feed. And as we grow you’ll be able to find more people you know on the system as well.
Thanks again for the thoughtful post, and just drop us a line if you have any other questions or feedback. Happy browsing!
Hi Zack,
Thanks for replying to this post and elaborating on the features. I had forgotten about certain features like the lack of the login requirement which is pretty cool.
Congratulations on SocialBrowse and good luck
Arpit! Thanks for the great analysis. We’re in the beginning stages of making something we hope will be really cool and your feedback as Zack mentioned, is a big help.
Just wanted to comment that by default your shares are private but because you registered a public name to share your links under your readers can publicly access your shares and profile page through this link.
http://socialbrowse.com/shares/arpit/
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sending me that link. I did not know of it. I think socialbrowse has a lot of potential and I have an itch I am hoping it can scratch. I will be keeping my eyes on it in the days to come.
Arpit, that was a good post. Please do send me an invite to the SocialBrowse.
After reading some of the replies I may actually make use of that invite. As you know I still use Pownce for the link sharing, and was using browser sync…but now that I know it’s DOA time to find a new solution for the links I want archived, and dammit that means yet another thing to sign-up, set-up and integrate into the daily flow.