Name: Sitesimon
Quick Pitch: Share your click stream with friends in real time and increase your influence score by discovering good content first.
Genius Idea: Sharing what you find online can be a great way to stay in touch with your network and become a valuable social media connection. And there are scores of services to aid you in this mission. There are different services to help you share multiple links with one short URL, share your text messages, share your music, share photos, and share videos.
Instead of managing the tools to accomplish all of this sharing, Sitesimon (pronounced "site simon," though originally contrived as "sites I'm on") gives users the option to just share everything automatically. Your friends can browse through your click stream and visit the sites that you've visited.
Using a browser add-on, you can choose to either select certain sites that you want your friends to see or, if you set the service to automatic, to block from view what you want to keep to yourself (whose Facebook profile you're visiting 12 times a day, for instance).
The major challenge for the company will be convincing users that Sitesimon is a worthwhile way to share content. The company's main argument is that what is most interesting on the web isn't necessarily what people decide to share. Plus, it's a lot easier to passively share content than to copy, shorten, and broadcast it.
Recently launched competitor Dscover.Me lacks the feature that we think might make Sitesimon worth signing up for: a "site score" that measures web influence. Your score improves when you see a web page earlier than other Sitesimon users and when other people on Sitesimon view pages through your click stream. In other words, you're rewarded for discovering cool stuff on the web, even if you don't make an effort to broadcast it.
Sitesimon was founded by three recent graduates of NYU and is currently unfunded. Only about a month into private beta, it's too soon to tell how the concept will catch on. But it will be interesting to see if people are ready for the "all-in" level of sharing that the company is betting on.
Sitesimon is currently in private beta, but 500 Mashable readers can get early access by signing up here.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 7immy
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark