Tuesday, September 04, 2007

BlogRovR: Blog posts related to the web site you're looking at

Activeweave pushed has a new version of BlogRovR. BlogRovR is a Firefox extension which, as you browse a site, provides a small panel displayed on top of the page showing what blogs are saying about the site you are on. The interface of the Firefox extension and the BlogRovR site are very polished. This is some nice work!

Jean Sini showed me his work a few years ago when it was still a Greasemonkey script. Since then his company has focused on enhancing your browsing experience by providing relevant information about the site you are visiting, first with Stickis and now with BlogRovR.

Now, I would love to see BlogRovR evolve into a platform, like Facebook did. Is knowing what the blogosphere is saying about the web site you are visiting that important to you? It may or may not be. But imagine you could have much more. For instance, I would be more interested in looking at what comments users have left on del.icio.us about that site. Or what other web sites are related to this one (information which can for instance be extracted from del.icio.us), and for each one of those sites I'd like to see right away how much traffic it has, how long it has been there, and links to relevant snapshots on The Wayback Machine. Possibilities are infinite. And starting with a niche application, executing it well might be a wise choice.

Seen through TechCrunch