LiveBar Bringing Some Social Networking to Any Site or Web Page
By Azam on September 16, 2008
The LiveBar consists of a thin strip “social tool bar” that sticks to the bottom of the browser window and displays social content related to the page. Live Bar is a widget-like site addition that brings social networking community features to any website. The LiveBar shows and offers three types of user contributions: Conversations, Soapboxes, and Shouts. LiveWorld is the company behind LiveBar been around for some time and is best known for its white labeled social networks. The company offers an easy to deploy and powerful tool for media content companies with ability to drive traffic with social networking tools for increasing advertising revenues.
From TechCrunch Describing Features of LiveBar
Conversations are essentially lightweight forum threads where users can post messages and solicit responses. Soapboxes are akin to blog posts and Shouts are like tweets in that they’re restricted to 140 characters. In the LiveBar’s simplest implementation, these pieces of UGC are associated with individual URLs, so when you move from one page to the next, you see different content.
However, they can also be tied together into so-called bundles so that discussions form across pages that relate to each other. The LiveBar can also be rolled out across multiple sites on different domains, with bundles providing social glue around pages and sites that were formerly fragmented.
From VentureBeat on LiveBar
With these features, a previously static web page becomes more interactive, making the overall site stickier, meaning users will linger on it longer. That translates into a more attractive site for advertisers and more ad revenue. Users can click on different tabs on the translucent bar to read or leave their own messages. The LiveBar is fairly unobtrusive and doesn’t slow a site down, the company says. Customers can mix and match the social networking components as needed.
Because the LiveBar features are standardized, they’re easy to add to any site. It takes minutes to do. By comparison, getting companies to add customized Web 2.0 features to web sites can often take months. As such, LiveBar is a tool for retrofitting pages that were created in the days before Web 2.0. It’s a way for companies to play catch-up in the Web 2.0 game, where engaging consumers in a conversation is just as important as presenting information to them.
Peter Friedman, Chief Executive of LiveWorld
On a page that promotes “Entourage,” for instance, HBO could create a social network for the hit TV show with LiveBar where people can discuss the content of the page, said Peter Friedman, chief executive of LiveWorld in San Jose, Calif. He calls this “contextually relevant community,” meaning that users can leave comments exactly where they want to on a large media site. You can, for instance, create a social network for a particular episode of Entourage by putting LiveBar on the page that describes that episode.
LiveWorld will likely add LivBar to existing clients which it handle social media for a number of well known clients inclncluding: A&E Television Networks, The Campbell Soup, eBay, HBO, HSBC, Kraft Foods, LeapFrog, Neutrogena, MINI Cooper USA, TJX, and QVC.
Categories : Media & AdsTags : LiveBar, LiveWorld, Social networking
Azam:
Thanks for compiling these writeups on LiveBar. We’re excited about its launch today, and we think it has the potential to create a new model of starting and building lively community discussions.
–Bryan Person
LiveWorld social media evangelist