LiveWorld now introduces “LiveBar” and Mark Hendrickson from Techcrunch has a review showing now any static website that embeds this lightweight social script.
I first saw mockups of this product a few months ago from LiveWorld, and it seemed impressive, but unlike embedding chat, comments, forums, or blogs directly into the webpage, this is an ‘overlay’ that is quietly positioned at the bottom of any webpage.
What use cases could warrant this overlay experience versus an embed? Existing large websites with an inflexible CMS system that makes UI changes difficult. Companies that want to experiment with social on their websites but aren’t ready to dive in. Lastly, websites with heavy interactive marketing or content where community should take a back seat to what’s being shown. Expect to see competitors of Liveworld to develop their own versions of Livebar, allowing lightweight deployments of community features. Also, expect this to be a great ‘sampler product’ for LiveWorld to demonstrate community to hesitant brands –much like the easy to deploy OpinionLab tools.
Looking forward, whether companies like it or not, the future holds that websites will be social, and it means that customer opinions (good and bad) will circumvent their marketing content. The LiveWorld folks also have launched a community site, where you can interact with them further.
I’m conducting a Wave report on this community platform, and it’s become very clear to me that the technology is a commodity (that’s why there are around 100 vendors) and what really is going to count is strategy, service, support, and knowhow.
Related Resources
Status Update 2: The Forrseter Wave Report What Facebook Connect means to brands Thinking Long Term: Google’s New Browser ‘Chrome’ Forrester Report: Online Community Best Practices
This reminds me of Disqus or MyBlogLog in that a group that needs a quick entry into the social media space can slap this on instantly leverage an existing social community.
I really like the look of this. Naturally some sites are going to be too image conscious to display someone else’s branded or themed widget but this still has huge upsides to the right audiences – those with time to market concerns or low budgets.
Apologies for the typo in my previous comment. It seems I was too excited to notice a missing “and” in the first sentence.
Yup, we should expect to see browsers to offer these features as well.
Good call – I just got an invite to “Socialbrowse” yesterday. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like a ubiquitous Firefox-users’ social network that’s available to me on every site I touch.
There’s a tangentially related idea going on at WebWars (and others): “WebWars: EVE is a new type of game about conquering territory and controlling territory – but, in this case, the territory is websites”. From what I can tell it’s like Socialbrowse except it’s a game and it ties back into the EVE Online MMO.
Daniel
Would it be too far to suggest that Facebook could have an ‘overlay’ technology, or a browser plugin that could help them take their social graph to any site you visit?
It’s all possible.
Jeremiah: Thanks for the writeup on LiveBar, and for the link to our new SocialVoice community. We’re in full agreement with you that it takes much more than technology to do community the right way. We also know that LiveBar on its own is not community, but we believe the rich conversations that will develop on LiveBar-enabled sites will be.
@Daniel: You’re really nailed the audiences on the audiences that should be a good fit for LiveBar. Companies so often have to spend months and months of development time and costs to integrate a community platform into their site. LiveBar helps address that problem.
Having talked to many of the vendors out there as part of my job search, I think that LiveBar really changes the picture from the technology side, reducing the headaches of entry into community that exist for many companies and organizations. The other pieces that are key — strategy, community experience, support — they’ve already got those pieces in play. It makes me wonder how the pure technology players are going to make it. (Full disclosure: I am doing consulting work for LiveWorld)
I’ve searched high and low but found very little information how to actually get LiveBar. I did eventually find from one visitor comment, that it costs $1000 and that in reality mean the title of this post is inaccurate because very few social media websites (most of which are blogs) have a thousand dollars to spare.
Ian
Expect Liveworld’s competitors to launch these tools. Also, expect Facebook, MySpace and other social networks to offer similar tools