Social Browsing & Swarming the Web

In the land of Web 2.0, beyond social networking and social bookmarking lies the growing area of social browsing. Social browser Flock and browser plug-ins StumbleUpon and The Swarm are leading the charge.

Flock is a new web browser built on Mozilla's Firefox that has added social features such as:

• photo sharing with online friends through the browser including drag and drop of photos for sharing, uploading or posting comments
• search on your favorite search engines and websites
• a WYSIWYG blog editor that allows you to drag & drop text or images from the web for your blog and manages multiple blogs
• drag and drop RSS feed subscriptions.

StumbleUpon is a social browsing tool that allows users to rate and review websites through a Firefox extension, which in turn creates a community of rated and reviewed sites. Pressing the "Stumble" button in your browser's toolbar and selecting a topic of choice, like Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, takes you to a random website based on the community's ratings. You can also find new sites of interest by browsing through other users' recommended sites (a concept similar to music library browsing in Napster).

Swarm (pictured above) is a social browsing website that features a real-time graphical map of its users' browsing activity. The Swarm map features hundreds of interconnecting websites as it follows what sites its users are going and coming from. The map is created by anonymously tracking the websites that participating users are visiting through a Firefox extension (similar to Alexa) and updating itself every second with new traffic data. Sites that are gaining traffic become larger graphically and move towards the center of the swarm while sites that lose traffic become smaller and move towards the outside of the swarm. Users can use the map to browse for new sites or to chat about sites in the Swarm with other online users.

Like all social-based websites, the power of social browsing tools lies in their network of contributors. So long as people are willing to participate, these tools provide great value to web surfers and will continue to gain more users. This summer, StumbleUpon topped 1 million users - through its Firefox extension alone - and followed with the release of an Internet Explorer extension. They will never overtake search as the primary way to find what you're looking for on the web, but they are a fascinating way to browse the web based on common interests, not to mention a neverending way to pass the time...

Links:
Mashable on Stumble Upon

Mashable on The Swarm

TechCrunch on Flock

CNET on Flock