6 ms·

Socialbrowse: Y Combinator Startup is Twitter For Links

45 points by mhartl 18y ago

ajkirwin 18y ago
Looks interesting. Seem to have missed out on the invites though. Ah well.
rokhayakebe 18y ago
Sounds simple and useful. Can we please get a few invites?
lbrandy 18y ago
not gonna lie, i'd use this site :) I basically use AIM for precisely this purpose, at this point. I have my own little AIM mini-network for link spamming amongst friends.
ajbatac 18y ago
Me too. Can I have an invite when a packet is available for additional traffic? ;)
- thingsilearned 18y ago
  We opened up more. Try again. http://socialbrowse.com/techcrunch/ http://socialbrowse.com/techcrunch/
  - ajkirwin 18y ago
    Well, I'd try again.. if it was up ;)
    - thingsilearned 18y ago
      Some heavy usage on a new app. Sorry about that :). Should be good now.
      - inovica 18y ago
        Tried with 2 different email accounts. No email through
aconbere 18y ago
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 18y ago
i am not sure the real benefits, but I can smell it will be loved by spammers.
- garbowza 18y 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 18y ago
    What about PageRank fraud? Are the links nofollow?
yangyang42 18y ago
I'm trying it now. First impression: Totally Awesome!
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- yangyang42 18y 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 18y ago
Site isn't responding (22:00 EDT).
- markbao 18y ago
  Confirmed, 22:23. Site is down.
- jonknee 18y ago
  It really is Twitter for links, they even have the uptime record!
- thingsilearned 18y ago
  Should be good now. Sorry about that.
rglullis 18y 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?
- garbowza 18y 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.
jonknee 18y 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.
ajkirwin 18y ago
Ahh, finally. And wow, yes. Very nice! A few suggestions: It'd be nice if I could, y'know.. collapse the sidebar.
- thingsilearned 18y 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 18y ago
I hope they get this right. I've been waiting for this for years.
s3graham 18y 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).
- thingsilearned 18y 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 18y 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.
- garbowza 18y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227122 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227122
gaika 18y ago
You can open Hacker News in firefox sidebar for the same functionality :)
mhartl 18y 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 18y 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.
- thingsilearned 18y ago
  To disable the popups in firefox go to Tools->Socialbrowse->Receive Message Popups
- thorax 18y ago
  If you have the sidebar up, also, the popups don't come up. I never noticed those until I closed the sidebar.
humanlever 18y 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.
- thingsilearned 18y 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 18y ago
It would be nice if the colors conformed to the users settings.
brianr 18y ago
liking this a lot. great start!
fuzzythinker 18y ago
how's it different than friendfeed?
- joshwa 18y ago
  or tumblr?
axod 18y ago
Seems like not much time since 8aweek launched, and now it's on the backburner? Any insight into what happened?
- aneesh 18y 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?
  - thorax 18y 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 18y ago
http://www.socialbrowse.com/ http://www.socialbrowse.com/ direct link for people that won't click a techcrunch link anymore.
mpc 18y ago
I'm using it now and it's pretty darn awesome. Is it fair to call it a "distributed reddit" ?
Prrometheus 18y 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 18y 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 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?
- garbowza 18y 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.
thorax 18y ago
Reminds me of me.dium, but I like this much better.

45 points by mhartl 18y ago

ajkirwin 18y ago

Looks interesting. Seem to have missed out on the invites though. Ah well.

rokhayakebe 18y ago

Sounds simple and useful. Can we please get a few invites?

lbrandy 18y ago

not gonna lie, i'd use this site :) I basically use AIM for precisely this purpose, at this point. I have my own little AIM mini-network for link spamming amongst friends.

ajbatac 18y ago

Me too. Can I have an invite when a packet is available for additional traffic? ;)

thingsilearned 18y ago
We opened up more. Try again. http://socialbrowse.com/techcrunch/ http://socialbrowse.com/techcrunch/
- ajkirwin 18y ago
  Well, I'd try again.. if it was up ;)
  - thingsilearned 18y ago
    Some heavy usage on a new app. Sorry about that :). Should be good now.
    - inovica 18y ago
      Tried with 2 different email accounts. No email through

aconbere 18y ago

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 18y ago

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

garbowza 18y 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 18y ago
  What about PageRank fraud? Are the links nofollow?

yangyang42 18y ago

I'm trying it now. First impression: Totally Awesome!

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
yangyang42 18y 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 18y ago

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

markbao 18y ago
Confirmed, 22:23. Site is down.
jonknee 18y ago
It really is Twitter for links, they even have the uptime record!
thingsilearned 18y ago
Should be good now. Sorry about that.

rglullis 18y 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?

garbowza 18y 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.

jonknee 18y 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.

ajkirwin 18y ago

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

thingsilearned 18y 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 18y ago

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

s3graham 18y 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).

thingsilearned 18y 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 18y 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.

garbowza 18y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227122 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227122

gaika 18y ago

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

mhartl 18y 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 18y 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.

thingsilearned 18y ago
To disable the popups in firefox go to Tools->Socialbrowse->Receive Message Popups
thorax 18y ago
If you have the sidebar up, also, the popups don't come up. I never noticed those until I closed the sidebar.

humanlever 18y 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.

thingsilearned 18y 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 18y ago

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

brianr 18y ago

liking this a lot. great start!

fuzzythinker 18y ago

how's it different than friendfeed?

joshwa 18y ago
or tumblr?

axod 18y ago

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

aneesh 18y 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?
- thorax 18y 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 18y ago

http://www.socialbrowse.com/ http://www.socialbrowse.com/ direct link for people that won't click a techcrunch link anymore.

mpc 18y ago

I'm using it now and it's pretty darn awesome. Is it fair to call it a "distributed reddit" ?

Prrometheus 18y 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 18y 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 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?

garbowza 18y 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.

thorax 18y ago

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