Sitesimon encourages you to spy on your friend’s web activity

Sitesimon is a clickstreaming service that keeps users connected with the sites their friends are visiting in real-time.

Clickstreaming is a bit different from bookmarking. Using bookmarking services, users are required bookmark and often tag sites in order to share them with friends and save them for later. However with clickstreaming, it’s more of a real-time stream of your web activity and browser history, a process that usually works automatically.

With the use of clickstreaming, services such as Sitesmon can offer their community a more intimate experience between users. It’s cool because you can discover new websites that your friends possibly wouldn’t normally share. The site will also give you recommendations based on the sites your friends say you’d enjoy.

Sitesmon shares your visited sites passively, allowing you to surf the web as you normally would without hitting a share button. It posts the visited sites to the network with the use of a browser add-on available for both Firefox and Chrome.

The user interface of the network displays the activity in a news stream, somewhat similar to the news stream feature found on Facebook. If you find something great and think it demands a comment, you can do so by appending a note to any link. I found that browsing friend pages is highly addictive, there’s something extra fun about creeping someone’s web history and I honestly discovered some interesting stuff.

You might be thinking this service sounds a tad obtrusive or creepy and it’s understandable that the idea of clickstreaming may worry you. But, Sitesimon gives users control with a series of privacy options such as manual sharing, blocking sites and additional settings that limit who can see your stream. Any post or link can also be deleted, so in the event that you visited LOLCats and you don’t want anyone to know, you’re completely safe.

The biggest drawback of this service is the lack of users. There’s an option to import friends from Facebook although I was only able to add one single friend. Like most social networks, Sitesimon won’t survive without the support of the community and it’s hard to expect people to use your service if there’s no one there. But, to be fair, it’s still a very new service. Overall it’s a pretty great place to discover new sites.

We’ve Got Invites

Sitesimon is currently in private beta but we’ve got 500 invites ! Reserve your invite now by going to Sitesimon.com/TNW