Symbaloo, a privately funded startup founded in the Netherlands in 2007, is based on a simple idea: Instead of typing URLs or poring through a list of bookmarks, Symbaloo users visually scan a wall of icons that contains links to their favorite sites. Clicking an icon goes to a preset URL.
More important, Symbaloo users can create customized walls of icons -- Symbaloo calls them webmixes-- tied to a specific topic. Existing examples are coupon-hunting, music-streaming sites, weight loss, and other mainstream topics. But I'm sure there's one for open source or Net neutrality in there somewhere.
CEO Klaas Lameijer is on a campaign to popularize his eye-catching interface in America. He describes the Symbaloo user experience as "icon-clicking yourself through the Internet." He claims to have 350,000 active users. But to date his site has been Netherlands-centric. He's now trying to promote Symbaloo to a U.S. audience. In a phone call yesterday, Lameijer told me he's up to just over 1,000 webmixes made in the USA.
My first reaction to Symbaloo's wall of icons was that it would be a much better interface to my hundreds of cable TV channels than the current scrolling text list. It even resembles the wall of icons from ads for Apple TV, or Apple's Tops Sites feature in its Safari browser, which maintains an array of thumbnailed websites based on where you've been going a lot lately.
Symbaloo doesn't have that kind of smarts, but it does lay out 60 icons on a standard-size monitor in a way that invites eyeballing them to find a favorite destination, rather than reading a list of text website descriptions. (I remember a guy from Netscape saying that 60 was the average number of bookmarks their users had, of which most went unvisited. But I haven't been able to confirm the stat today.) It will also crawl your Twitter and Facebook applications to make icon-array visualizations of your friends and their activity.
Lameijer doesn't have a revenue plan in place yet. Ads placed into webmix walls seem like an obvious tactic. Right now, he is proud that there are no ads on the site.
Will computer users replace their home pages with Symbaloo en masse? Probably not, but Lameijer is out to prove me wrong. The most encouraging sign of Symbaloo's potential success: The most popular webmixes aren't the shrink-wrapped walls about celebrities, but the custom ones built and shared by small groups of users with common interests. "Microcommunities are the real growth we've seen," he told me. Symbaloo is a long, long way from becoming the world's homepage, but unsolicited customer demand from the ground up is a sign that it has a chance. Lameijer didn't say this, but it seems blazingly obvious that Apple might be interested.