Swarm is a social web-browsing site, which is pretty much the same description of StumbleUpon - though the services differ greatly.
Swarm operates through a Mozilla Firefox extensions which tracks the websites the surfer visits and then visually tracks them on their website, though a Flash application. Personally, I think AJAX on this site would be amazing, though no doubt it would take a lengthy amount of time to code.
All sites currently being viewed by Swarm users are displayed on this page as thumbnails. When the user changes the site they are viewing, a line points you to a new one. As the service is anonymous, alll thumbs for all users are in one place, and after 10 seconds this gets confusing!
Swarm allows users to discuss a page, though this feature does not appear to be used very often - perhaps due to the fact messages aren’t stored for very long, and in my opinion live chat doesn’t work when discussing webpages. Note that chatting through this system requires an account, though your surfings remain anonymous.
This service does have implications on the user’s privacy, much like Alexa, however it is somewhat protected due to the simplicity of turning the extension off and the option not to track certain sites.
There is an annoyance in the latter feature though: you can’t block a sub-domain (x.blogspot.com) or a directory (geocities.com/x) without blocking the whole domain and all of it’s other sub-domains and directories. Introducing a wildcard would, in my opinion, fix this.
Though in every way Swarm tries to keep the user’s privacy, it still seems a little scary. I expect many anti-spyware programs may pick it up, as they do with Alexa.
The site is an interesting experiment, though I doubt in it’s usefulness for discovering new websites. For that, I’ll stick with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
I see that you actually found someone to talk to. I tried it out but found no one there. In a way I like the randomness of this (much like true surfing used to be). I blogged this but not soon after I disabled the extension.
I kept seeing the same webpages (Google and Bouncy Becky or what was she called) and navigation just became a bore after a while.
Interesting visualization project I think, but I doubt it’ll become a real ‘tool’ anytime soon.
Nice site with great extra features : but I don’t have time lol
[...] me.dium is a Firefox extension, still in private beta, which is a bit similar to Swarm, as it visualises the websites different people are visiting. The difference between Swarm and me.dium is that it displays websites other people are viewing similar to the one you are viewing. [...]