Simple sharing service Bemba now has international potential

Some start-ups have simplicity as their unique selling point. The founders take an existing idea and then simplify it, cherishing the hope that the masses might find it easy enough to use. Dutch social bookmarking service Bemba is a good example of this. It’s like Delicious with a Digg flavor, aimed at teens and young adults who want to share fun stuff on their social networks via Bemba. I wrote a short article about them when founders Arne Dibbits and Aaron Peters launched Bemba. Back then, I complained that they were only offering integration with Dutch social network Hyves and Twitter. But since this week, the service has some international potential as they’ve launched a Facebook app.

Of course they already offered Twitter integration, yet people who microblog are likely to use a social bookmarking service by now. The people Bemba is aiming for have probably never heard of social bookmarking before.

When these not so web-savvy people register, they’ll see a cool feature I haven’t seen on Delicious so far: personal stats. Users can track how many people clicked on their shared content and from which platform. Smart move by Dibbits and Peters, as it’s a pretty sticky feature. Dibbits told me that since they’ve introduced this feature, traffic has increased by 100 percent. Let’s see whether this service goes viral or not.