Socialbrowse: Y Combinator Startup is Twitter For Links

This seems a bit like the project I work on (timelope.com). But still requires people to actively push data into the network. With an extension installed and already looking at what you browse, why not just let that data they generate just by browsing be the key part?

maien• 18 years ago

i am not sure the real benefits, but I can smell it will be loved by spammers.

garbowza4• 18 years ago

Actually we are spammer resistant. Your shared links are only broadcast to people who follow you. If you spam, then nobody will follow you.

mikedouglas• 18 years ago

What about PageRank fraud? Are the links nofollow?

yangyang422• 18 years ago

I'm trying it now.

First impression: Totally Awesome!

yangyang422• 18 years ago

holy crap.

Second impression: I'm hooked.

This application is so sticky. I am now following only a few people, but occasionally seeing their links on the bottom of my browser is becoming very interesting/addicting.

I am also browsing through some of my old bookmarks and sharing them.

IMHO, I'm finding this application to be much more compelling than Twitter.

rw• 18 years ago

Site isn't responding (22:00 EDT).

markbao• 18 years ago

Confirmed, 22:23. Site is down.

jonknee2• 18 years ago

It really is Twitter for links, they even have the uptime record!

thingsilearned7• 18 years ago

Should be good now. Sorry about that.

rglullis• 18 years ago

One quick question: the article said this project is from the same guys that started 8aweek (garbowza). Is this a second startup by a same person that was approved by YC, like kiko and justin.TV, or has it received the "Y Combinator Startup" brand because of the founder?

What I'm trying to say is: is this something that the YC guys have in mind when investing?

garbowza4• 18 years ago

PG is right when he says your ideas change as you implement them! This started as an offshoot to 8aweek, believe it or not. We switched gears and started working on it exclusively near the end of our YC session.

jonknee2• 18 years ago

You should probably detect browsers because the .xpi I just downloaded does nothing for Safari. There's nothing about the page that says you need FireFox.

ajkirwin3• 18 years ago

Ahh, finally.

And wow, yes. Very nice! A few suggestions: It'd be nice if I could, y'know.. collapse the sidebar.

thingsilearned7• 18 years ago

Easy. Hit the X in the upper right of the sidebar or the green icon we put in the toolbar.

If the sidebar's close you'll still get notifications in the form of growls. If you don't like the growls those can be disabled. Toggle Tools->Socialbrowse->Receive Message Popups

Thanks for trying us out!

richcollins• 18 years ago

I hope they get this right. I've been waiting for this for years.

s3graham• 18 years ago

Seems neat at first try.

I'd be more likely to keep it installed if it didn't uglify (for example) the news.yc main page. Can you make the icons detect what they're next to so that the text doesn't get all mis-spaced? (FF3, Vista, in case it's not-always).

thingsilearned7• 18 years ago

thanks for the feature request. We're working on smarter ways of embedding the icons. If you have good ideas make sure you let us know.

If its bugging you you can disable them in Tools->Socialbrowse

JesseAldridge• 18 years ago

That popup that comes up every time somebody shares a link is annoying and I can't figure out how to turn it off.

garbowza4• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227122

gaika• 18 years ago

You can open Hacker News in firefox sidebar for the same functionality :)

mhartl• 18 years ago

I just realized something. When first using 8aweek, I noticed that it would track my restricted sites (say, Hacker News), but not the sites linked from my restricted sites (which, with sites like HN, are the real time-sucks). I remember asking about this, and the 8aweek guys said they were working on tracking those links, too. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that's how they got started on Socialbrowse.

Mistone• 18 years ago

im not sure I dig the little pop-ups and want them to go away. after I turn off the popups I can focus on trying this out.

thingsilearned7• 18 years ago

To disable the popups in firefox go to Tools->Socialbrowse->Receive Message Popups

thorax3• 18 years ago

If you have the sidebar up, also, the popups don't come up. I never noticed those until I closed the sidebar.

humanlever• 18 years ago

Not sure if this'd equate to feature creep or not but it'd be useful to know what category people submitted a link to in addition to who did it first and how many followed.

thingsilearned7• 18 years ago

Great request. On anyone's profile page you can select "all" under any of the links they share. This brings you to a page that shows the link and all the people who have rated it.

When you're on a site you can also get to that info page about the site by clicking the "shared by (n)" link in the sidebar. (where n is the number of people who've shared it.)

We should at the number of shares and the first share to the info page. Thanks for the feedback!

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

It would be nice if the colors conformed to the users settings.

brianr• 18 years ago

liking this a lot. great start!

fuzzythinker• 18 years ago

how's it different than friendfeed?

joshwa• 18 years ago

or tumblr?

axod• 18 years ago

Seems like not much time since 8aweek launched, and now it's on the backburner? Any insight into what happened?

aneesh• 18 years ago

Did RescueTime have anything to do with them finding the new idea more tempting? I always thought those two were awfully close to both be funded by YC. And I personally liked RescueTime more. Did 8aweek have any traction before they jumped?

thorax3• 18 years ago

I love 8aweek-- probably one of my top 3 Firefox extensions. Really helped remind me when I got sucked into sites when I should be working.

Not sure if it works for everyone, but it works well for me. RescueTime on the other hand hasn't really done anything for me (except take up 100% CPU a few times). I may be in a minority on that one.

peakok• 18 years ago

http://www.socialbrowse.com/

direct link for people that won't click a techcrunch link anymore.

mpc• 18 years ago

I'm using it now and it's pretty darn awesome.

Is it fair to call it a "distributed reddit" ?

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

No thank you. I'm trying to spend less time on the internet, not more. It's like announcing better crack to a recovering addict.

oditogre• 18 years ago

>2 Receive real time updates of cool links shared by people you like

How do you handle a link that gets sent to the same person by two people? What about a link that you yourself sent? Can it be 'sent back' by somebody that you follow, that doesn't follow you (i.e., they don't know that you've already seen it)? I'm kind of thinking of situations where, i.e., person 1 'watches' person 2, 2 watches 3, 3 watches 1, and a, b, c, ... z watch 1, 2 and 3, and it makes me think of that 'Bedlam DL3' story Larry Osterman wrote about a while ago (http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx).

I mean, won't this cause a lot of duplicate / unnecessary traffic through the server and possibly to clients? Or are you doing it in some other way than how I'm thinking?

garbowza4• 18 years ago

This happens all the time: multiple people you are following share the same link. In fact, that is one of the cool effects: a shared link starts spreading through the social graph. What you as an end users sees in your sidebar is a single view of that link, with multiple small user icons lined up underneath it, showing each of the users to have shared it. Think of Gmail's message threading.

thorax3• 18 years ago

Reminds me of me.dium, but I like this much better.

Socialbrowse: Y Combinator Startup is Twitter For Links

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