Social browsing is a loosely defined phrase that means many things to different people. Because of the confusion about what social browsing is, people have strongly differing opinions about its relevance. Some think that social browsing is nothing new, others believe it will be the next big thing, while still others believe that social browsing is a market doomed to fail.

To make predictions about the success of the social browsing market, you must first be able to accurately define it. To be considered social browsing, a product must contain at minimum the following prerequisites:

1) Portable
The product must provide some aspect of omnipresence, adding value as you browse the web, and not limited to a destination site. Social browsing is about taking your social network and applying it everywhere you go. This rules out most social networks (although Facebook is a special case with Facebook Connect, discussed in more detail below) and social news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and SocialMedian..

2) Adds value to every page
In addition to merely being portable, as any browser extension is, a social browsing product must potentially add value to any page you visit, meaning each page you browse to with the tool is better than when you browse there without the tool. This requirement rules out most social bookmarking tools such as Del.icio.us, which is portable but does not make the pages you browse to better.

3) Social
This aspect is obvious, but to be more nuanced, it'd be accurate to characterize social browsing as being socially dependent. In other words, the social component of a social browsing product cannot be optional; instead, it must be the critical aspect of the service, and the people you are friends with should directly affect the value you gain from using the product.

Taken in aggregate, services referred to by the social browsing moniker generally fall into several categories:

Sharing

The oldest and most general form of social browsing revolves around sharing content with people of similar interests. Stumbleupon is the best known within this category, and is perhaps the first tool to be considered a social browsing product. New services such as Socialbrowse and Slingpage are extending this space with a more real time and personalized social feel.

Mashups

Social browsing mashups piece together existing social networks and bookmarking services and make them available as you browse the web, typically in the form of browser extensions, such as Yoono, or in the case of Flock, an actual browser.

To a lesser extent, aggregation services outside of the browser have been described as social browsing. Tools such as FriendFeed, SocialThing, SocialMedian, and Plaxo Pulse connect you to your friends' activities across a variety of services. Because these standalone sites don't allow real-time interaction with their services outside of their own pages, and are not portable, we don't consider these within the social browsing space.

Annotations

"Web annotations" is a bit of a dirty word for startups due to a virtual graveyard of failed attempts at annotating the web. Going back to 1999, when a company called Third Voice first tried web annotations, numerous iterations of this concept have been attempted, nearly all without success.

The failure of web annotations are primarily due to the abstract nature of the function itself. When referred to as "annotations," users are unsure what to use them for, or how it'll improve their lives. The same concept, when called "comments," are remarkably useful and popular, and thus the ability to comment on links without leaving the page has much more potential to gain traction.

Thus a new crop of web annotation services are focusing this classic concept around more useful and targeted features. These include DotSpots, Diigo, and others.

Broadcasting

The newest genre of social browsing applications is centered around broadcasting information about the actual site you're on in real time, and finding or chatting with other people on the same page. Some of the most prevalent within this category include Me.dium (now rebranded as social search engine OneRiot), Adaptive Blue's Glue, and Browzmi.

While location broadcasting seems like a logical evolution in social browsing, in practice it has an air of creepiness and tends to broadcast more information about your web browsing experience than most people are comfortable sharing.

What Works and What Doesn't

Most users aren't comfortable chatting with strangers, particularly about something as traditionally personal and private as web browsing. However, users are particularly comfortable, and even eager, to chat about things they like with people they know or with whom they have similar interests. As such, the most appealing approach to the majority of people is to gradually introduce them to new users of similar interests, and letting them control the pace of this introduction until they are ready to engage that user in conversation and ultimately bring them into their trusted social circle.

Given the unproven nature of location broadcasting and annotations, there's clearly a reluctance from users to change their browsing habits dramatically. The success of simple sharing and mashup services indicate that users are more apt to adopt incremental social improvements to their browsing. As such, the social browsing applications that gain the most traction in the short term will be those that enhance existing browser behavior with a slight social angle rather than attempting to revolutionize web browsing into an entirely social activity.

Facebook Connect is another recent player attempting to conquer social browsing, but approaches this space from a different angle. Rather than traveling with you as you browse the web, Facebook is using its extensive market penetration to "exist" on as many different pages you visit. As such, Facebook Connect's affects you passively, but there is considerable overhead for websites to adopt it within their pages, and thus it will never contain the same reach as a tool that travels with you as you browse. We believe that products such as Socialbrowse can become much more successful because the pages they add value to approaches 100%, whereas Facebook Connect will likely never gain a reach of even 1%.

The Sweet Spot

Socialbrowse is a unique application in that it is a combination of several of the genres discussed above. It occupies a sweet spot by combining the best qualities of several categories, most notably by introducing real time social sharing, in-page commenting (don't say "annotations!") and synchronous, non-intrusive communication centered around the current pages you're browsing. This provides a faux real-time feeling to your social browsing, letting you interact at your own pace without exposing information about your browsing behavior that you don't explicitly push to others.

Over the coming years, the definition of social browsing will become clearer as the market converges on the embodiments that prove most successful. Given the current economy, the social browsing field will thin out considerably as users flock to the product that provides the most seamless and non-intrusive method of browsing with your friends. We are actively positioning Socialbrowse to become the product to best fit this niche and as a result, lead the market.

You may notice that we are constant tinkerers when it comes to our product. We are indeed our own biggest critics, and combined with all our users' great feedback, you've got a recipe for constant improvement!

We've released many new usability enhancements across the Socialbrowse site recently. Some of these updates are fairly mundane on the surface, but taken in aggregate provide a much better experience: the Socialbrowse blue is slightly darker, the page header is shorter, and the side columns are sleeker and less dominating. You'll also notice on the profile pages that the comment listings now have the link title underneath, and that the colors and spacing of these lists and the comment pages provide a better flow.

Some of the other updates are more noticeable and functional. For example, the homepage and each link's comment page now contains an icon indicating the total number of shares for the link, and a quick-share button.

We've also expanded the link feeds to be featured more prominently on the homepage and within your profile pages. For each link that's shared, we make an attempt to pull its RSS information, including a link summary and available images. We now show this feed summary underneath the link on the popular pages, within your profile pages, and on the comment pages to give you an overview of the link's content. Over time we'll continue to improve the breadth and accuracy of these feeds to make them even more useful!

Twitter set the trend of responding to other users with the @ syntax and Socialbrowsers have naturally followed suit by communicating with each other with @ in our comment threads.

We figured since this was the preferred way of responding to each other, it's about time we made it easier to do. Therefore we've release our new "Replies" feature. Using replies, you can now quickly address each other in comment threads, with Socialbrowse supplying Gmail-style auto-fill. From your profile you can now quickly track conversations involving you. Here's how it works:

From any comment page, including the embedded comments, you can now directly respond to another user using the @ syntax, with Socialbrowse providing an auto-fill, consisting of all your friends and anyone who has already contributed to the current conversation. Just type "@" and a few characters of their name, and Socialbrowse will provide matches to choose from. When you select one of the names from the list, Socialbrowse will track these replies and serve them up to the subject of your response.

One of the best parts of Socialbrowse is engaging in conversations with smart people. But it can be frustrating to step away for awhile and forget which conversations you wanted to follow up on. Or perhaps you don't even know if someone responded to one of your comments. With the Replies feature, you can now track who has responded to you on any threads from your profile.

Just select the Messages/Replies tab in your profile and we'll show all of the comments addressed to you using the Replies feature, with links back to the conversation. That way you can always go back and get in the last word ;-)

We've created a new user in Socialbrowse called "Socialbrowse Team", which will let Dave and I share content directly related to Socialbrowse and startups. Dave and I will continue to do the vast majority of our sharing and commenting through our own personal profiles, but we realize that not everyone will necessarily want to follow us personally (although it's hard to imagine why). For those users who still want to keep up to date with content related to Socialbrowse, following the Socialbrowse Team profile will allow them to do that.

Now that Firefox 3.1 has entered beta, Socialbrowse needs to get compatible for all you Firefox early adopters. We've released a new version of Socialbrowse in the Socialbrowse Labs that supports Firefox 3.1, and we've also added a new feature: the friends tab. This tab provides you a new view of your friends' shares, showing the last share for each of your friends, letting you see which friends have been active recently and when.

Head on over to the lab, upgrade Socialbrowse, and let us know what you think!

You may have noticed a slow down of Socialbrowse (and at many points, a full outage) since last night. This was due to some feature upgrades we had deployed. Unfortunately, the new code did not play as nicely on our Socialbrowse servers as they did on our test environment! We tried to solve the errors, but eventually realized that to restore consistent service we'd need to remove the new features until we can confidently diagnose the root cause.

Socialbrowse should be stable again now, so please be sure to share and discuss all the back links we may have missed! We'll fix the leaderboard and get those new features out to you as soon as we can figure out the problem they were causing, and we'll tell you about them here.

We apologize for the problems and will improve our processes so it doesn't happen again.

Today we deployed another request driven feature. We've had a lot of people asking to see more information on how many social points they and others have acquired. So we threw together a simple page to give a full view of all of your social points.

Its a great page for checking your status and researching the interests of a person you're considering to follow. The default view shows the top level categories and your cumulative score for that group. To see the individual scores for the subcategories just click on any of the rows to expand.

We've also added a list of your Popular Shares if you have any. These are links that you were the first to share and are currently on the popular page.

This page will likely evolve to show more statistics and information as its requested. Make sure to let us know what else you'd like to see!

You may have noticed yesterday a recent redesign of the Socialbrowse site, and a new homepage that promotes the most popular links for the day. These updates are actually a small preview of some big new changes we are working on. While we can't yet reveal all the details, we've been getting some tremendous early feedback and we think you're really going to like what we have in store. So keep the feedback coming and enjoy the new design!

We are changing the location of the Socialbrowse Meetup this Thursday to the Dunn Bros Coffee on University by St Anthony Main. This will allow us to better accommodate for parking and space. Please see here for directions and a map.

So bring out a friend or two, and meet me and Dave this Thursday at 6pm. We hope to seeya there!

A lot of you have already made friends (and maybe even adversaries) with other Socialbrowse users based on the shared links and lively discussions. Many people tell us that most addicting thing about Socialbrowse is interacting with the people they meet on it!

Now with the help of a dedicated Minnesotan Socialbrowser we're organizing our first ever Socialbrowse meetup on November 6th. This will give you a chance to meet some fellow Socialbrowsers in person, give us direct feedback, introduce some newbies to Socialbrowse and just kick back with cool people.

Why are we having it in Minneapolis? Well, Dave and I will both be in town and we've got a high density of Socialbrowse users in the area. If we get a lot of interest, we'll follow it up with a Silicon Valley meetup down the line.

We're currently meeting at Open Book's Coffee Gallery, however if anyone knows of other area coffee shops that can accommodate a large group, please let us know!

Let us know if you're thinking of coming. And we encourage everyone to bring some friends who might want to try out Socialbrowse.

One more thing: Dave and I will be giving a sneak preview of our biggest new feature ever to those who attend - we're looking forward to seeing you there!