About a month ago, I remember Techcrunch tested a bottom bar that brings a lot of value for blog design: It displays an RSS subscribe button, a link to your Facebook Fan page, your Twitter account, notifications, IM integration, and much more. The comments following the Techcrunch article were not very positive regarding the bar. Techcrunch readers tend to bitch all the time about everything, so I went ahead and tried the social bar anyway.
The bar is brought to you by Wibya, an Israeli startup. Wibya is still in private Beta, but I got my invite pretty fast, so I am sure you will too if you haven't signed up yet. Once you have access to your account, you can go straight to your dashboard and customize your bottom bar with the following features:
First you can chose the color design of your bar, making sure it fits your blog right (can't control the shape though). Then you choose which apps you want to integrate to your bar:
Try and play with the Facebook and Twitter buttons below: The Facebook box looks very similar to the Fan page widget Facebook provides. Along with your profile, the Twitter box also shows results for your blog's name on Twitter Search. You have a translate button, which I guess is powered by Google Translate, access to games you can play without having to leave the site, sharing options and live notifications.
There are a few things I really like about Wibya:
1. The idea of the live notification: Quite frankly, that is an excellent tool when you want to scream something out loud in your visitors' face, like a link to an article, a change in your blog, anything that you wish could standout a little more than the rest of your content. Wibya even keeps statistics on the usage of notifications. The downside of Wibya's notifications is that you can only update them from Wibya's Website. However, by judging by the philosophy of the technology, I am pretty sure that we will be able to update our Wibya's notifications from anywhere on the Web very soon.
2. I love that the Twitter box shows search results. I don't like the fact that you cannot manipulate the query for the search. My blog's name is not the hottest thing going on Twitter. I think this box should interact with the page the visitor is on: Wibya should grab the tags of the article my visitors landed on, and display Twitter Search results of those keywords. Otherwise, the Twitter box is just a bling with no added value.
3. I really like to see all the essential links for my blog above the fold, visible and clickable. I find organizing a blog's sidebar extremely tricky, and Wibya makes it up for the mistakes being made.
4. Wibya did not forget that bloggers need to know the performance of each widgets on their blogs, and provides basic stats on the use of each applications. Seeing that the bar is being used by visitors is a leitmotiv to keep it up.
The monetization issue
I personally don't have any monetization expectations from Wibya: I just find it to be a very nice communications tool. However, a lot of other bloggers might expect that, and the Wibya team is also probably wondering if and how advertising could maximize their profits.
There is already an advertising channel on Wibya, but it hasn't been activated: Heyzap, the service providing the games for Wibya. Heyzap makes money by displaying ads while the games load, and leaves a generous chunk of it to the developer of the game. Recently, Heyzap announced that publishers were now getting a share of the revenue as well.
I checked it out and no ads are displayed on Heyzap from Wibya, at least not on my blog. This means the team hasn't checked in for making revenues. However, I think that Heyzap is not the kind to distribute its games by bulks for free and forever, so Wibya will have to turn on this revenue channel eventually. When that time comes, I am curious to see if Wibya will let original publishers have it all, or if they are going to play middle-man and take half of our bread. If they do, they will cut a 15% revenue share in half, which makes the monetization incentive really lame. If they don't, how the hell will they make money?
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