Even in this age of social media, browsing the web is still a solitary activity, even though a couple of services like Socialbrowse, Kiobo, or Me.dium have tried to to turn browsing into a more social experience.
Another social browsing service we like a lot is Browzmi. When we first looked at Browzmi earlier this year, it was basically a browser inside of a browser, which was a cool technical achievement, but the experience was held back by the fact that you had to log in to the service and use Browzmi’s own bookmarking service. Now, a newly released Firefox extension replaces the ‘browser within a browser’ and greatly enhances the social surfing experience.
Follow Me
Browzmi allows you to surf the web together with your friends or family. Whenever the service is turned on, all of your friends on Browzmi can see where you are on the Internet, the stories you commented on, and the pages you bookmarked on Browzmi – thanks to a smart implementation of XMPP, all of this happens in real-time. There is also a built-in chat function and the ability to see related content on YouTube and Flickr.
Thanks to Browzmi, you can follow your friends around the net, or chat with other users who are on the same web page as you.
Virtual Toolbar
Just like the first release of Browzmi featured the interesting ‘browser within a browser’ concept, this extension features another first: unlike other add-ons, Browzmi doesn’t actually create a Firefox toolbar – instead, it adds a ‘virtual’ toolbar to every page you surf to while Browzmi is active. To protect your privacy, you can selectively turn Browzmi on or off for separate tabs and browser windows.
The biggest advantage of this new extension is that you can now use your own bookmarks and add-ons while using the service.
Browzmi’s CEO Travis Parsons tells us that he is also working on integrating Facebook Connect in the near future.
Verdict
This new extension takes Browzmi to a completely new level and turns a fun tech experiment into a really useful service. You obviously want to be careful about where you surf to when you use the service, but feel free to follow us here if you decide to sign up.
We found using Browzmi to be surprisingly fun, and thanks to the new extension, it is now also extremely easy to use.
