Your current location, the articles you read on HuffPost, updates on the club you got into, your relationship status as you break up, get back together, and break up again with your boyfriend– there was really nothing else left to share with your “friends”. But three NYU Stern graduates found one more category of information to share that says a lot about you: your browsing history.
Demetri Karagas, Paul Ratajczyk, and Steve Gutentag decided in April 2010 to create sitesimon, a web tool that allows you to share with your friends the sites you’re on (Originally named for it’s function, “sites i’m on,” the web application is actually pronounced “site simon”). Their goal– to facilitate a new level of communication between friends through passive sharing. “This is something that allows you to share what you’re doing or discovering,” says Karagas. “It’s about discovering the web in a new way.” The idea is, unlike sharing links on Twitter or Facebook, you can share what you’re looking at without thinking about it, thus allowing your friends to see web pages that you may not have deemed worthy of a tweet or status update.
About the Founders: Gutentag, Karagas, and Ratajczyk have not yet defined particular roles for themselves– they each contribute to a variety of tasks, from networking, to managing the budget, to coordinating with the programmer. “We call ourselves janitors a lot to remind ourselves we have to do everything, including cleaning up the messes we make” says Gutentag. The co-founders are the only equity-holding members of the sitesimon team since they are currently self-funded. They also have a contracted programmer, Justin Fargione.
How it Works: Mashable posted a great article about the start-up earlier today, but here’s a quick summary: you create an account on sitesimon.com, which has a visual set up similar to Facebook (to ease new users’ acclimatization). You can then download the browser add-on–available for Firefox, and since last week, also for Chrome– and start sharing!
Concerns & Solutions: For those users who just don’t want to risk accidentally broadcasting more personal surfing history– like that time you were on WebMD with some questionable symptoms– the sitesimon boys have come up with a few solutions. First and most simple is the manual share option, where instead of automatically sharing all browsing history, the tool only records pages you click to share. Second, sitesimon automatically blocks all websites with the prefix “https,” which indicates a secure network used by online banking sites or email hosts. And third, you have the option of adding certain websites to a list of blocked domains. For example, if you list Facebook.com, all of your Facebook stalking– whether it’s through pictures or hacking into your roommate’s Facebook account– will be hidden to your sitesimon followers. Finally, you can choose to turn automatic sharing on and off.
Despite the many options, the founders anticipated some hesitance from users. The site is currently in beta testing, so users who request access are able to explore the tool and provide feedback directly to the website. “Once they start to consciously think about what they’re looking at, they think ‘Oh this is kinda cool,’ and they get past that barrier and they start sharing everything,” says Gutentag. “We’ve seen that with the beta testers right now—a lot of them start off pretty slowly, and then after they start to use it, they just share everything.”
Growth & Updates: Sitesimon had a couple hundred users three weeks ago, but since last week’s release of the Chrome add-on, and the recent news coverage by Mashable, the number of active users has grown significantly. In the long run, the founders hope to implement innovative methods of revenue-generation like targeted ads and offers, or real-time coupons that correspond to your browsing history. Even sooner on the horizon are some new and exciting features to the website, two of which were added this week. First, they have created a point system to recognize the website’s “trailblazers,” according to Gutentag. Essentially users get points for being the first to visit a site that later goes viral. The second update is a new commenting system that is attached to pages as opposed to domains, so if you visit a page once and someone comments on it, when you visit it again a month later the comment will be brought up again.
Stay tuned for more updates on sitesimon and its founders!
Click here to request a beta invite code. Meanwhile, take a look at the sitesimon blog!
Update:
The boys of sitesimon presented Monday, January 10th at NY Tech Meetup. See Gutentag’s presentation here.
Filed under: Unreported New York Tagged: | browsing history, Gutentag, Karagas, LinkedIn, New York, New York City, Ratajczyk, real-time, sharing, sitesimon, social media, start up, tech, Twitter, unreported New York
how interesting. thanks for keeping me posted on the next new thing. btw, aren’t the nyu folks amazing? before this new business, there was the nyu grad student who invented foursquare….