Google Hangouts competitor Rounds has just announced the launch of a new “co-browsing” feature which lets friends browse a limited number of popular sites together simultaneously.
This news follows Round’s rollout of HTML5 games in May, which included Tetris and Draw Something clones, plus classic board games like chess and checkers. Currently, Rounds says it has 8 million total users, approximately 6 percent (500 thousand) of which are on mobile.
To launch co-browsing, Rounds teamed up with Channel.me, a Netherlands-based startup which provides multi-user Web browsing services for consumers and businesses. Rounds calls its site browsing feature an “open URL” experience, but it is limited to just 14 sites: Google Search, Wikipedia, Preen.Me, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Amazon, eBay, ESPN, The Huffington Post, wanelo, Imgur and TheFancy.
We’re betting that free services like Pinterest will be most popular for Rounds users, but the company seems determined to make a truly social shopping experience popular on mobile devices. With support for major sites like Amazon and eBay, Rounds will quickly find out if shopping is the sort of behavior users will want to embrace during a video chat.
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