DISQUS

This is a problem that we all struggle with. We definitely want to engage users and have them fill out their profiles, but at the same time we want the barrier of entry to be essentially nil. So there's definitely a balance, but if I were to err on one side, I'd say it's more important to make it easy to get started, even if that means some of those users don't stick with it. Perhaps the solution would be to provide better ways of dropping inactive friends? :)

I agree with the sentiments above. I'm not a huge fan of the fonts. I think mixing a more professional font with the "funness" of the tall stick guy would provide a good combination. I also kinda like the idea of p-wagz of using both the front and the back. For #3, I think the "cross" comes across as too religious - that was the first thing I thought of when I saw it. Perhaps you could integrate the tall stick guy there instead? But overall I like where you're going with this, and it made for a fun post to read.

thematrix777, I'm not sure what you mean, but to follow this Socialbrowse Team profile, just take it's link from the post above and click follow. If you don't follow that profile, don't worry - the good links usually make their way around through other users in your network!

Sounds very similar to Wundrbar at http://wundrbar.com, although Wundrbar is farther along and has a killer flight checking capability. In addition to Ubiquity and Yubnub, it seems like this space is starting to heat up. This competition will definitely push each service's feature sets along rather quickly.

@Showsaphone, we're converting all of our preferences to the Add-ons preferences tab to be more consistent with Firefox's extensions. They prefer these options to be in section for consistency among add-ons. Do you want this to be in the Tools section to be more accessible? We might code up a "Ctl+click" to open feed items in new tabs even if you have set links to open in the same tab.

Philip, it's been great having you on board Socialbrowse from the start. Early adopters like yourself have made the Socialbrowse community great, which is the most important aspect to our health as a product. So thanks!

@Nick, we actually do provide that already! Go to "edit profile" and in the sharing tab, enter a username for yourself. You'll then see the unique RSS link for your feeds shown!

@Shawn, thanks for all the efforts, we really appreciate it! We're looking forward to growing Socialbrowse, however it's going to be a long, gradual process. The launch is only the beginning!

I'm a co-founder of Socialbrowse. Socialbrowse is quite different from Stumbleupon. With Socialbrowse, you create a network of people who you wish to share and discuss links with, and you receive a real time feed. While stumbleupon lets you pull random links, Socialbrowse pushes targeted, relevant content to you shared by people in your network. And as Dilan mentioned, Socialbrowse is the only service that makes every page you visit better by embedding small icons next to the links on that page that your friends have shared or commented on.

In fact, many Socialbrowse users also use Stumbleupon - interesting content that they find on Stumbleupon is then shared and discussed on with their community on Socialbrowse.

Thanks, SocialMind, we appreciate the kind words. If you ever have suggestions of what you want to see, just drop us a line via feedback. Many of our improvements and feature refinements come directly from user suggestions.

Shawn, thanks a bunch for the great writeup! We continue to try to improve Socialbrowse based on what our users suggest, and this new design helps in that respect. That said, we're actively receiving suggestions on the new design to determine how we can tweak and improve it further. So we'll be scrubbing posts like these to find common themes.
Happy browsing!

I'm the co-founder of Socialbrowse - thanks for the nice writeup! We're rapidly improving the product based on our users' feedback, so give it a run and feel free to send us any suggestions. You'll see improvements on a weekly, if not daily, basis...

We currently support content filtering. Click on "feed" in your profile and you'll be allowed to select which categories you want to receive on the right.

We've had a lot of requests to open links in new tabs and we're working on it. Unfortunately it's not trivial to do so from a sidebar (the browser doesn't treat these as normal links), but the feature is coming!

Thanks for trying out Socialbrowse! I'm one of the co-founders, so hopefully I can provide some insight into our thought processes.

Regarding the categories, we're refining them based on user feedback, so soon you'll have a category that fits SEO. The reason we chose categories rather than tags is because entering tags is slow, and we want to provide the quickest way to share links. Additionally, we allow users to filter which links they receive based on which categories they like (or dislike). This would be difficult with tags. But getting the list of categories right is difficult as well ;-)

And the reason for the invitation system? We want to make sure we can scale so we don't run into Twitter-like outages. We have had zero downtime so far, which we're proud of, and I'm sure our users appreciate. We'll be opening the system up publicly soon, so if you're on the waiting list, you won't be much longer!

Thanks again for trying it out - don't hesitate to send us more feedback. Most of our new features result from what our users have been requesting.