Nebul.us Lets You Share Your Interests in the Cloud
Nebul.us is a new beta application that allows its users to benefit
from groupthink by allowing people to find and share great content easily. The web application was built by the team at Use All Five, Inc., based in Los Angeles, California.
The application is built around making it easy to share what you think is good, and suggesting the latest stories that you should be reading. Similar to StumbleUpon, you can tag items you find interesting and share them within the cloud.
The problem with many of these bookmarking websites is that it requires effort on part of the user. Optionally, the user activity could possibly be tracked with persistent third-party cookies, but security and privacy concerns increase.
Nebul.us also has plans to allow advertisers to benefit from the shared user data as well as information collected by publishers about what people like. Again, this could deliver more useful content to users, but privacy and security may be compromised in fact or perception.
Nebul.us is easiest to use when running the Firefox toolbar, similar to StumbleUpon.
Nebul.us allows you to see what other users or your friends are finding and sharing. The caveat is that it requires some basic precautions so you are not sharing visits to competitive or confidential websites.You may not always want your friends knowing everything you read related to your job role, how often you visit a competitor’s websites for research/employment opportunities, or how often you actually check Facebook while at work.
Your account starts with a clean slate, requiring you to add all sensitive websites as you find them to your blocked list, but at least that process is quick and easy. I thought that it would be nice if the application could use the power of groupthink and suggest likely sites that similar users have blocked, but the product is still in beta. The learning process could, in time, automatically block (or suggest blocking) certain websites from appearing in your cloud activity.
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