Thursday, November 18, 2010
Automatically Share What You Browse with Friends [INVITES]
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Sitesimon
Quick Pitch: Share your click stream with friends in real time and increase your influence score by discovering good content first.
Genius Idea: Sharing what you find online can be a great way to stay in touch with your network and become a valuable social media connection. And there are scores of services to aid you in this mission. There are different services to help you share multiple links with one short URL, share your text messages, share your music, share photos, and share videos.
Instead of managing the tools to accomplish all of this sharing, Sitesimon (pronounced “site simon” though originally contrived as “sites I’m on”) gives users the option to just share everything automatically. Your friends can browse through your click stream and visit the sites that you’ve visited.
Using a browser add-on, you can choose to either select certain sites that you want your friends to see or, if you set the service to automatic, to block from view what you want to keep to yourself (whose FacebookFacebook
profile you’re visiting 12 times a day, for instance).
The major challenge for the company will be convincing users that Sitesimon is a worthwhile way to share content. The company’s main argument is that what is most interesting on the web isn’t necessarily what people decide to share. Plus, it’s a lot easier to passively share content than to copy, shorten, and broadcast it.
Recently launched competitor Discover.Me lacks the feature that we think might make Sitesimon worth signing up for: a “site score” that measures web influence. Your score improves when you see a web page earlier than other Sitesimon users and when other people on Sitesimon view pages through your click stream. In other words, you’re rewarded for discovering cool stuff on the web, even if you don’t make an effort to broadcast it.
Sitesimon was founded by three recent graduates of NYU and is currently unfunded. Only about a month into private beta, it’s too soon to tell how the concept will catch on. But it will be interesting to see if people are ready for the “all-in” level of sharing that the company is betting on.
Sitesimon is currently in private beta, but 500 MashableMashable
readers can get early access by signing up here.
Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, 7immy
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
Facebook Gives App Developers a Cool New Tool
Facebook has announced a new feature for app developers. Starting today, you’ll be able to create and use “Test User” accounts for testing your Facebook applications.
With the new, API-controlled accounts, you’ll be able to create ample test users without violating the TOS, and FacebookFacebook won’t disable the profile for being fake or for being a spam account.
Devs can create one test user, or an application can make up to 50 test accounts. Any test account can be accessed by any developer associated with that application. To create an test user account, just use the Graph API with the application access token.
With the API, you can make friend connections between various test user accounts without having to login as one particular user and manually accept friend requests. This nicety should make testing app actions among groups of friends a lot easier.
Once you’re done with the test accounts, they can be easily deleted.
Also, as Facebook developer relations head Douglas Purdy noted in the comments on Facebook’s blog post on the subject, test users will be helpful to Facebook engineers working on platform stability.
“This feature is absolutely key for us to be able to work on stability and bugs,” he wrote. “Our hope is that this lets folks build automated tests to give us an early warning into any breaking changes we miss… This should help people give us narrowed repro of bugs they encounter in their test suites.”
There are a few limits as to what you can do with a test user. Testtest
accounts can’t interact with real users, and they can’t interact with public content, such as a post on a Page. Test users will only have test privileges for the app, and they can’t be converted to non-test accounts.
Given these improvements in how Facebook handles app testing, the company plans to disable all old test accounts and its developer test network by the end of the year.
What do you think of Facebook’s new test user tools? Will they make developing apps easier for you?
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