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.

Figure - Social browsing product/genre fit

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.