Dscover.me is launching today as a way to share and recommend what you are reading or watching on the Web. Using a Chrome or RockMelt add-on, you can share pretty much any link – sorry, “Discovery” – with friends and followers.
Using Facebook Connect, you can sign in to Dscover.me and start sharing websites with friends via a so-called “Discoveries Stream.” A Whitelist feature allows you to check which sites you’d like to share and which sites you’d like to keep private. With these settings, Dscover.me will automatically add Whitelisted sites that you’ve visited to your stream.
After setting up an account, users can follow friends and people with similar interests, as determined by their browsing behavior. Dscover.me says that in the future it will provide content recommendations to users as they browse the Web.
Privacy is an issue here because essentially Dscover.me will share whatever you are browsing (if it’s on the Whitelist). But the company says that the Whitelist allows users to specify what they are comfortable sharing when it comes to browsing. Dscover.me also allows users to remove posts from the system and modify their Whitelists at any time.
Here’s the biggest issue Dscover.me faces, though: sheer indifference and puzzled potential users.
Honestly, there are so many ways to share interesting links these days (from bookmarking to Facebook likes, posting links on one’s blog or Twitter account to good old emailing and whatnot) that the unique proposition of this service completely eludes me. The majority of links I visit in any given day isn’t worth sharing at all, let alone “automagically”.
Your mileage may vary – give it a peek and tell us what you think.
