Ben Shoemate's Notebook

After three months in private beta, SocialBrowse has formally launched their public beta along with some new features. It appears they made a concerted effort to listen to their beta testers and actually implemented many of the most requested features.

SocialBrowse allows you to share any website with your friends and contacts with the click of a button, which is added to your Firefox or Flock browser. Click the button with the dialogue bubble and you can leave a comment for others to see along with the website you shared. The button with the SocialBrowse logo opens the sidebar panel, which displays the social feed for all of your friends and their online activity in real-time, so there’s no need to refresh your browser anymore.

There’s also a leaderboard that displays the most active and popular members of SocialBrowse when it comes to sharing links. You earn a point every time someone shares a link that you’ve shared with the community, so it’s a Digg-like reward system which encourages members to share high quality content. It also helps members find interesting new information.

SocialBrowse does something interesting when it comes to new members. Instead of starting with an empty friends list like most other social networks, they actually add several of the most active members in the community just to give you a jump start to using the service. Obviously you can delete them in time if it turns out that you don’t like what they share, but it’s a good idea for giving newcomers a taste of what the service has to offer right out of the gate.

One of the new features that becomes obvious right away is the integration with Google, which means new members can now join SocialBrowse with their Gmail account with a simple click. While it’s not as sexy as an OpenID connection, it’s the next best thing.

Profiles are now more revealing and thus useful. Each profile page will show the user’s activity in a single column, with tabs to let you filter by the type of activity (shared link, comment, message, or everything).

The in-page embedded icons are more noticeable and show how many users shared each link in the page. Hovering over the icon expands into a more detailed view of the user(s) who shared the link, and some of their other recent activity.   Also, commenting has been improved to toggle open/close with a single click of the toolbar button. Opening the comment menu shows all existing comments for the current page and lets you submit your own, without ever leaving the site you’re on.

When it comes to sharing links via the toolbar buttons, you can actually save them to different categories such as Technology, Sports, Entertainment, etc. It’s all part of the click n’ save process, so it’s rather quick and painless and should encourage members to tag more often. Also part of this process is the ability to send a link straight to Twitter once you add your login information in the account setup area.

SocialBrowse is unique because unlike other social networks that do their best to keep you on their site, SocialBrowse actually does everything in its powers to push you off their site and into the World Wide Web so you can use their tools to share content with your friends and everyone else.

One could say that SocialBrowse is like a hybrid of GoogleReader + Digg + Twitter. What’s nice about their approach to things is that it doesn’t interfere that much with the way you work and play on the Web. It doesn’t force you to change your normal routine, which is a breath of fresh air. I’ve used countless services that let you share links with friends and no one makes that process easier than SocialBrowse. No more copy and pasting links to email or social networks just to share things with friends or colleagues. You simply click and share and you’re done.

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