technology

With everything on the web going social nowadays, you can expect to see all sorts of web applications to have a social networking feature. The main goal of the social feature is mainly for users to interact with each other while using a web service or application.


Browzmi is a unique and interesting social networking service. It is a mix of social networking and browsing. It is a combination of a lot of online tools: a social sharing/bookmarking site, Instant messenger and a browser. Browzmi is a browser within your browser which can be quite confusing if you describe it like that but it’s exactly what it is. It’s a web app that acts as a browser which is equipped with instant messaging. This allows members to share with each other what they are browsing in Browzmi.

The browser within the web app is a unique way of sharing URL’s to your friends. You can either use Browzmi to surf the web or use their Firefox plugin to easily transfer a URL from your original browser to Browzmi. This will allow you to quickly share a page in just a click. The plugin, “Browzmi Homebase,” allows the web service to connect to your browser and allow web traffic to bypass their servers. When I tested it without the plugin, some sites are missing some widgets and some CSS failed to load. After installing the plugin, the sites that I visited worked perfectly.

The service functions more of an instant messenger than a screen sharing site. Browzmi’s goal is for friends to discover websites and share them with each other in real time. This is made possible by the “rating” and “add to favorites” tool which serves as a bookmarking feature for the service. Once you gave a URL a thumb up or marked it as favorite, your friends will be notified by a sound and can immediately see it live on their collapsible and unobtrusive sidebar. Of course, you can always do that by copying a URL and pasting it on your friend’s IM. The only difference is that with Browzmi, your friends can instantly see the pages that you have bookmarked and they can always go back to the pages that you have visited even if you are offline and easily access that URL when they visit your Browzmi profile which is very common to social bookmarking sites.

Browzmi is also a great place to share your other social networking profiles to your friends. You can easily add your blog URL, Twitter address, Facebook profile page, Friendfeed feeds and a lot more to your Browzmi profile. By doing this, your friends can easily browse your social pages in just one tab. They can rate you pages and make comments about your blogs or social pages.

As I see it, Browzmi is more useful when connected users are online. Otherwise, it’s just like most social bookmarking sites where you can share your favorite pages of the web with your online buddies. I guess the combination of both live and offline features is what makes it different from the others. The real-time sharing is its selling point.

Thanks to Travis Parsons, founder of Browzmi, who was kind enough to guide me through the web app and answer a few questions through their chat service.

Posterous is a new and different kind of blogging service with unique features compared to other free blog platforms. The service is designed for on-the-go bloggers who wants to make quick blog entries without going through the process of using a blog editor. Although it has a resident rich text blog editor, Posterous blog entries can also be published through email and SMS.



Account registration in Posterous is also a unique process. In order to create an account in Posterous, you must send an email containing your first blog entry to post@posterous.com. The subject of your email will be the title of your post and the email message will be the body.

What I like about Posterous is its portability. Using email to make blog entries is a great idea. What makes it even more useful is that you can attach different types of media along with your “post” email. I tried sending a blog entry with an image attached to it and the result was great. Large images will automatically be resized and can also be viewed in its full size. It also lets the user to download the full size image through a link that the engine created. Sending a zip file of photos and images will result to a gallery type blog entry. Attached MP3’s will be playable using their branded ephonic player while documents are automatically converted to iPaper.

The New Feature

Previously, Posterous already offered auto posting to Twitter and Flicker accounts which is great. You photo posts can immediately be seen on your Flickr account and you Twitter followers will get updates each time you make an entry. Now, they are offering auto posting to other blogs which confuses me strategic-wise. I understand the fact that Posterous wants to extend their usability but this act might seem like too desperate a move. The service already shows a lot of potential in becoming a full pledge blogging platform packed with easy to use features. By doing this, they are driving users away from actually using their service as a blogging platform, and besides, bloggers who are concerned with SEO will question this issue of having double posts on different blogs. That being said, I can think of a few uses for the new feature. Since Posterous hosts all your images and files, you can use Posterous as a gateway to your blog posts on your 'other' blogs. The images will be auto resized and you can even post podcasts without using plugins or inserting codes.

Posterous offers a unique and easy way of blogging. I see it as a great tool for casual bloggers who just enjoy posting from their mobile phones and anything that has email. It would seem more appropriate if they focus more on creating a name for themselves as a blogging platform instead of being used as a mere gateway to popular blogging services. They may not get millions of users right away but it will surely build an organic amount of loyal users as time passes.

Twiddla is another digital whiteboard jam packed with collaboration features that you might find both interesting and useful. We have covered a collaboration tool called Dabbleboard before and really got great responses from our readers. If you liked Dabbleboard, then you might enjoy this even more.


So what makes it interesting? It’s a digital whiteboard where you can collaborate with co-workers and business partners online. What make it so special are not its drawing tools. Although the drawing tools are more feature packed than DabbleBoard, I still find Dabbleboard’s drawing features easier to use and more powerful than Twiddla’s.


Twiddla’s drawing tools features the usual shapes, freehand drawing, eraser, and text placement. The changeable pen sizes make it more versatile in making different line sizes. These tools are very common to digital whiteboards. What makes Twiddla stand out is the ability of the web app to add media on the whiteboard itself. You can easily add documents, email address and images. My favorite part of Twiddla is that you can also add Widgets, Codes and Mathematical formulas. There is also a chat feature which allows text and voice communication among the users.

Non-private collaborations can be done instantly without signing up. You can easily invite other users to your session by entering their emails on the invite form. They will then be redirected to your created Twiddla session.

Twiddla will only ask you to register if you decide to make your session done privately. Invited users will be asked for the password that you created for the session. This is another great feature for online collaboration as most collaborations are done in a secured manner, especially sensitive company discussions. The tools are very useful and the added text and voice chat makes it even more handy. There is no need to add each other's IM's of you are using different services which takes away the time spent on registering of a new IM account. This also takes away the platform conflicts of IM's being used in different operating systems.

Twiddla and Dabbleboard are two great free collaboration tools with different features. I personally like Dabbleboard for its simplicity and user-friendliness but you can’t deny that Twiddla’s versatile features make it more useful for all types of users. Its ability to insert widgets and codes are very useful for code writers. The document and image insertions will be of great use to everybody.

They call Twiddla a web-based meeting playground. It’s a pretty useful playground if you ask me.

Which of the two do you like better? Share your thoughts. We’d love to hear them.

Related Article:
DabbleBoard : Think and Communicate Visually