The Next Web

Squace unveils mobile browsing without typing

Written on May 28, 2008 – 1:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Swedish start-up Squace has introduced a new way of browsing the internet on your mobile. They’ve developed a service that allows users to browse without typing. Instead of a list of headlines, Squace shows a grid of little squares.
Each square is linked to a Web service such as a newsfeed, web site, game or widget. When you hover over one of these squares, a pop-up revealing the connected content and share feature appears. With a click, users open a new page with the desired content. According to the founder, Aage Reerslev, it’s a “game-changer”.

He might be right. Mobile browsing isn’t easy for not so tech-savvy people and Squace has been putting quite some effort in developing a new way of intuitive browsing. The company was founded in 2006 and privately funded by more than 30 private investors. While developing the service, it was thoroughly tested. In a study by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, participants were asked to solve 10 information-searching problems. With Squace, they did it with up to 88 percent fewer clicks in nine out of ten problems, and up to 78 percent faster in eight out of ten problems, compared with a leading carrier’s mobile Internet portal and software.

Although the statistics are impressive, I’m not totally feeling this new way of browsing yet. Especially when it comes to news, I prefer to see a list of headlines. It’s quicker for me to scroll to list like this than to hover over a dozen squares. Yet the sharing function does gets me excited. With a few clicks, my friends receive the content I want to show them. Also, I can easily bookmark interesting pages. But of all of this is only worth it if my friends join. How can I lure them into the world of Squace? Maybe they would come and check it out if I could put a widget with my shared Squace items on my blog. Solutions like these will help Squace to become viral. There’s your new top priority, Squace team.

I hope you like that post!

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friends, mobile, mobile browsing, share, squace

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Crowd Status: what’s your crowd up to?

Written on April 11, 2008 – 1:28 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Everybody on the social web is always sharing what they’re up to. We’re answering the “what are you doing?” question on Twitter, telling LinkedIn connections what we’re working on or sharing some fun thoughts with Facebook friends. Sometimes we might even forget to enjoy the moment because we’re busy sharing (I always think this when I see people filming a concert with their camera phones).

So one of the consequences is the updates of the people we REALLY care about might get lost in the overabundance of status updates. I’m not only one who notices this, as there seems to be a trend going on that we want to divide our “friends” in groups. Two weeks ago I wrote about a service that tried to create groups in Twitter, yet they failed miserably. Now there’s a new tool, which makes it possible to create group pages to see what your friends, colleagues, heroes or whatever are doing. It’s called Crowd Status and developed by Darren Stuart.

My crowd, The Next Web editors, is currently concerned with the following things:

The tool is very basic now: it only works with Twitter and there are no widgets, Facebooks apps or whatsoever. Though it works fine if you just want so what a small group of selected people is doing. You could link to it from your Netvibes startpage or put public links on your blog. I’m not sure whether Stuart will develop it any further as he considers it to be a “personal project”. Yet the “definitely in Alpha” sign do gives me hope.

crowd status, darren stuart, friends, social networks, status updates, twitter

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