Since we've been so busy developing the new version of Socialbrowse, we forgot to get our current version updated for Firefox 3.5. If you are one of the early users of the latest Firefox, you can grab a compatible version of Socialbrowse here. Otherwise the Mozilla Add-Ons Directory will publish the compatible version soon.

On Wednesday we silently rolled out the next-generation (now current generation) version of Socialbrowse! Those of you with the extension installed will notice some re-design and several bug fixes.

Those of you browsing without the extension will notice something incredibly different. Socialbrowse now
comes with its own mini-browser and there is no longer a need for the Firefox Extension!

We wanted Socialbrowse to expand out of the scope of just Firefox. To do this Zack and I had 2 options:

1. Build an equivalent extension for IE, Safari, Chrome, etc.


2. limit the power/functionality of Socialbrowse

We thought those options both sucked so we invented our own option C. Option C was to build a platform that would meet the following conditions

• no installation
  
• works on all major browsers
  
• provides all of the power of a browser extension
  
• easily extensible
  
• no loss of any Socialbrowse features
  
• no loss to the browsing experience
  
• minimal/no loss to browsing speed
  

The result is a mini Socialbrowse browser that works inside of your normal browser. Users can simply visit http://socialbrowse.com and start browsing in the Socialbrowse browser. There's no installation or signup required and no loss of features!

No one had ever made anything with all of those features so it was a big problem to tackle and a big question as to whether it would even work. Fortunately it does, and we're very pleased with the outcome.

The new Socialbrowse is still very much in beta mode. There are bugs and some web pages don't render properly. Bear with us as we work through these and feel free to send us links to pages that are screwed up.

We're also working a great deal on the scalability of the platform which is why we've chosen to do a soft (quiet) launch first and have held back on deploying some of the more viral features we've built. With every user's client polling our backend servers every 10 to 15 seconds the entire time that they're online, our servers undergo a heavy load that we're still trying to manage. We encourage you to invite others and tell your friends, but until we officially launch, please refrain from blogging about it or inspiring large waves of traffic. But don't worry, that day will come very soon.

Socialbrowse got some great coverage today courtesy of Fox47 and KTTC in Rochester, MN.

Dave and I were interviewed by Ali Lucia, who put together the following piece on Socialbrowse:

We're pleased to announce that Socialbrowse is now running on FathomDB! FathomDB is database as a service, allowing businesses to offload their database administration to FathomDB, which runs the server on a scalable, cloud infrastructure. This provides some big benefits:

* Database can be scaled from a very small instance up to nearly 14GB of memory (currently!).
* Pay only for the resources that you use
* Automated backups
* Tools for monitoring performance and queries

Moving our Socialbrowse data to FathomDB has been provided us a big relief. As anyone who has followed the Ma.gnolia saga knows, database management is a critical component to any startup. However, most startup founders are not also database experts and the degree of difficulty in properly setting up a scalable, safe database is very high. The worst part is you don't know you've screwed up until it's too late! Rather than hoping we were doing everything right, we'd only sleep well at night if we knew that our data was safe. Justin Santa Barbara, our friend and the founder of FathomDB, is the smartest database guy we know, so we can rest assured knowing our data is in good hands.

Setting up our database on FathomDB was simple. In fact, from the time we registered, we had our data migrated and running in under 30 minutes. Once you've ported your database to FathomDB, scaling, backups and monitoring are built right in. As Socialbrowse grows and needs more resources to run our database, we can easily upgrade our server in minutes. In fact, our friends at WebMynd are using FathomDB to insert up to 100 records per second! Additionally, FathomDB provides built in monitoring and analysis of your database's resource usage and requirements, making it much easier to determine when an upgrade (or downgrade) is needed, and diagnosing queries that are chewing up the most resources.

What has been the effect so far? Now Dave and I have been able to focus our attention solely on development, rather than database management tasks. Using Amazon EC2, we'd had to maintain a separate instance to serve as a slave and perform periodic backups to S3. Maintaining this setup and ensuring its proper operation became a huge hassle. Now we no longer have to support a slave instance to back up our database and we are able to downgrade the size of our web server instance since it no longer has to share resources with the database. And as a result, our sleep has greatly improved!

A snapshot of FathomDB's monitoring tools.

Those of you who have updated recently to the latest version of Socialbrowse from Firefox's automatic updater may have noticed that the title is wrong on the little message boxes that pop up in the bottom corner when your sidebar is closed. We have a fix for this error, although due to Firefox's add-ons backlog, it may take awhile for our fixed version to show up in their directory.

Instead, if this bug is bothering you, you can grab the fix by updating your Socialbrowse version from here: http://socialbrowse.com/labs/

We collectively reached a milestone recently on Socialbrowse: our 100,000th shared link! The lucky link was Microsoft's Ballmer touts 'best version of Windows ever.'.

This was a modest milestone, but considering we are a young company with a still growing user base we are very proud and appreciative of all of our great users who contribute to Socialbrowse with interesting links and insightful comments (mostly). Thanks for making this community great!

And a special thanks to those users who installed the Socialbrowse widget on their blog. Check out: SocialMind's "Social Arrow," a blog on social marketing. Samir Balwani's "Left The Box", a blog about internet marketing strategy. Shawn Kirsch's Th@ttalldude, a blog about Technology, Sports, Religion. And Walt Feigenson's blog about random ramblings, Wally's Follies.

If you haven't already, grab the Socialbrowse blog widget now!

One of the most effective ways of using Socialbrowse is to grow your audience of followers and increase your reach. The more people following you, the more people see the links you share and the comments you submit.

Since many of our Socialbrowse users are also avid bloggers, we have now created a way to increase your Socialbrowse audience while simultaneously personalizing your blog and improving its community.

The new Socialbrowse embeddable widget provides a simple way of broadcasting your latest Socialbrowse activity to all your blog readers, and promotes your profile to them to increase your audience.

It's easy to create and embed your personalized widget. Using the customizable widget tool you can simply specify the widget width and the number of shares you'd like to display. Then just copy the HTML code provided and paste it in your blog template.

To see some live examples, just look to the right of this blog, or check out the blogs of a couple Socialbrowse bloggers, That Tall Dude, and Left The Box.

We'd like to give back to our loyal blog friends as well. If you embed the Socialbrowse widget in your blog, send us an email at support@socialbrowse.com, and we'll write a follow up post with nicely targeted link to your blog to drive some traffic and improve your SEO!

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 ;-)