ClikBall Makes It Fun to Share Links Again

If you’ve ever been the type to share things you find on the web with your friends, ClikBall may be just the thing for you. No longer will you have to email the same link to 17 of your friends or paste it into 23 IM windows. With ClikBall, you just click a button and the link goes to everyone who follows you. Not only that, but you can have discussions in real-time about the links that get posted.

How it works

Setting up ClikBall is easy:

1. Sign up for an account (you’ll need an invite)
2. Install the Firefox extension
3. Follow some people, groups and blogs
4. Invite a few friends

Once installed, you’ll see a big red button near your location bar. This is what you click when you want to share stuff.

A window pops up that allows you to send the link to all of your followers, a group of your followers, or an individual. You also have the option of adding a comment.

When people you follow share a link, you’ll see a pop-up window in the bottom-right corner of your browser. This notification can be disabled at any time if it gets on your nerves.

From here, you could click “Add comment” and have a real-time conversation about the link using the built-in messaging system. Also notice the information on Cliks and Followers in the status bar.

What’s The Point?

I think ClikBall is a cool idea. Instantly share and discuss things with your friends right in your web browser. All it takes is a couple of clicks. The fact that it is all in real-time is definitely a killer feature. There are a couple of issues with it at this point, though:

• Nobody wants to start sharing things on yet-another-service
• The fact that it’s a Firefox add-on is an annoyance for some

If they’re serious, ClikBall will need to support broadcasting to all of your social services (Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.). This would make them exponentially more useful. Right now, using Clikball is just adding more work to your sharing activities. Sure, there is the benefit of everything being live, but I don’t think this is enough for people to pick it up.

ClikBall is currently in private beta and you can follow @clikball on Twitter.

Update: To see it in action, check out these ClikBall screencasts by Tad