I’ve been chugging away at preparing the lists, a/b split, and quantification for this months e-mail newsletter. I’m a little tired, and have been enjoying a nifty utility called SocialBrowse out of Y-Combinator for a week or two now. I figured I’d do a little sharing about it.
Social Browse is a Firefox Add-on. It sits comfortably on the left side of my browser. You can show and hide it much like your web history. Social Browse is what you would get if you were to take StumbleUpon and Delicious, run them into each other at high speeds, and then make it easier to share/use.
What I mean is, Social Browse let’s you share (bookmark) pages, but doesn’t use tags. I’ve been a religious user of Delicious, but frankly, trying to think of tags all the time is pretty taxing (advanced taxonomy or not). I’d much rather have a service where I say “this is a page I am going to come back to again, now share it with the people who like what I like via RSS, and then give me a great search algorithm that will let me find this page later on.“ And that’s kind of what social browse says. Except some of that stuff like search and RSS (my bad, it does rss) aren’t implemented yet, but social browse is still in its early stages, so I’m not complaining.
Where the whole StumbleUpon similarity comes in is social browse takes all the information from the people you’re following and integrates it with your surfing experience. What that translates to is if you come across a site that someone you’re following shared or made a comment on in social browse, it shows up in a clean way on the page. This adds some nice context to the web.
Of course, being in its early stages lends itself to social browse having some bugs. I’m a bit irritated because I switched computers and thus lost my profile. I went through their help which sort of arbitrarily explains what to do to get it back but doesn’t really. At least I don’t think. Does Social Browse serve any sort of business purposes at this point? Not really… not yet. Never the less, it’s a neat Firefox Add-on worth checking out and I’ve got 9 invites to bestow.
P.S. If you’re wondering what the heck Cuil is, don’t bother going to the site. Instead go read thegirlriots thoughts. She states my sentiments exactly, except in a much wittier and sarcastic way, so my sentiments + 1.