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.
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?
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.
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?
>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?
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
