Recently, I’ve been experimenting with different tools for ‘social browsing’. By social browsing, I mean having the ability to chat with others about the webpages you are visiting. In a sense, people have been doing this for a long time. When I find a webpage that is interesting, I may send an IM to my wife, and we might chat about the page in IM for a while. I’ve talked about websites with other chat tools, from IRC to Twitter and other microblogging sites and to virtual worlds.

I’ve also bookmarked sites that I like using Mento, which automatically book marks to del.icio.us and ma.gnloia, as well as a greasemonkey script that automatically bookmarks to some other sites, I forget which ones right now, since I lost the script in one of my upgrades, and never got around to finding it again.

Yet none of these tools are specifically aimed at synchronously sharing and talking about bookmarks. This is starting to change, and I’d like to highlight some different tools that I’ve been exploring.

The first is RocketOn. In RocketOn you get an avatar that walks around the website you are visiting. You can chat with other avatars that are visiting the same website. As you explore websites, you win prizes that you can use to modify the appearance of your avatar, and who knows what else.

When I first started using it, I chatted with a few different people. However, it seemed that most of them were refugees from AOL Chat rooms and none of them had much of interest to say. I’ve kept the tool running, but normally in a disabled mode, because there is one annoying downside. When you click, most of the time, RocketOn intercepts the click and makes your avatar walk to where you clicked. Not particularly friendly.

Today, I downloaded Weblin. I was struck by how similar Weblin is to RocketOn. At first glance, it does not seem that Weblin has the same level of avatar customization available. The little icon for controlling Weblin sits in the lower left hand corner of the website right on top of the RocketOn control button. I played with Weblin briefly, but soon wearied of it. The one feature that I did like was Weblin’s ability to bookmark a page to various social bookmark sites like Digg and del.icio.us from their control button.

Another tool I tried briefly was Exit Reality. It seemed similar to Weblin or RocketOn, with a little bit of Google’s Virtual World, Lively thrown in. Unlike Weblin or RocketOn, Exit Reality is three dimensional, and you can change the look at feel of a room. However, when I ran it on my machine, it slowed Firefox down to a crawl, and would crash if I went to any complicated pages. So, I disabled it, and can’t figure out or remember how to restart it. Maybe I’ll check that out again in more detail later.

Social Browse approaches things a little differently. Instead of having avatars running around the screen, they are much more like Twitter or some other microbrowser customized for sharing bookmarks and talking about them. They have a sidebar for Firefox, where you can see the latest messages. The sidebar is fairly similar to the Plurk sidebar for Firefox. In addition, they add some buttons to the navigation tool bar, so you can quickly share a link or comment on a link. One final aspect, they have a popup window, similar to GoogleTalk’s popup window so you can see messages of your friends.

However, as far as I can tell, you can only see the messages and links of your friends, and so far, none of my friends on Social Browse are posting that many links or comments that have drawn me into discussions. Nonetheless, I can see this as being a tool that has great potential.

If you use any of these tools, or any other interesting tools for sharing and talking about links, let me know.