Browzmi – naked browsing

I’ve just been playing with a fascinating service called Browzmi. It’s essentially a web browser that sits within a webpage, but one that manages to combine social bookmarking with social networking with instant messaging and a level of transparency that is almost frightening.

What do I mean? Look at the image on the right. This is the ‘Where is Everyone?’ tab. Here you can see how many people are on which sites at the moment. Clicking on a site allows you to see who those people are. Click on a name and you can either view their profile or start a chat.

It’s naked browsing.

But if you’re comfortable with that (and you can always do some of your browsing elsewhere), then this has all sorts of potential.

One of the best features of Del.icio.us is the way you can create a network – a collection of fellow bookmarkers with similar interests, whose bookmarks you can then follow.

Browzmi takes this and plonks a whole bunch of other stuff on top.

Firstly, although you can ‘favourite’ a site and add tags, the simple act of visiting a site is enough for your friends to see if they are online too.

Secondly, as well as favouriting sites you can give them a thumbs up or down, or write a comment. You can clip images. All of which is added to your profile feed – a kind of FriendFeed with its own RSS feed (currently not displayed).

The commenting facility in particular opens up some interesting options – for instance, the potential for a conversation around a page regardless of whether the site owners have a comments facility.

I also posted a ‘call for more information’ comment on one page so that future browsers with similar interests might get in touch.

And this moves into the social networking aspect of the site – you can add friends. You can start chats with them – or anyone. So if you’re on a webpage you can start a chat around it. “Let’s do something about this”; “Do you know anything else about this?”; “Do you believe him?”. It is another move towards the conversation toolkit I talked about previously.

The idea is not new, as ReadWriteWeb notes: Me.dium or Yoono do something similar – but in a more complicated, and less bold, way. Browzmi is simple, and brave. The question is whether enough users will be brave too.

Browsing in Browzmi I noticed I became curious about what other people were looking at; I also noticed that when I went to an obscure website about mobile phone activism as a test, someone followed me to it. When I noticed someone was looking at a webpage about an earthquake in LA that was happening, I asked him if he was there.

If this a sign of things to come? Are we too shy?

I’m off to put some clothes on.