Could Wibiya Make Your Blog Better?

Wibiya is a new toolbar developed by Modular Patterns Ltd., an Israeli startup company founded in 2008 which is backed by Dr. Yossi Vardi. It allows bloggers and other content creators to integrate many features into a simple and unobtrusize toolbar which is fully customizable. You choose the color scheme from about 30 options and you get to pick which features are available for your toolbar.

There his been a lot of backlash against web-based toolbars for some reason. Sites like Digg, Notify.me, and even StumbleUpon are sporting new toolbars and many are quite upset about it. The difference here is that Wibiya is simply another tool that your blog visitors can use interact with and promote your site. It’s not some random service trying to piggyback on top of your site.

Wibiya is currently in private beta, but you can request an invite on their site.

Getting Wibiya running is as simple as installing a plugin or pasting a bit of Javascript code. Blogger users can install Wibiya with a single click. Once you’ve got the toolbar installed, you’ll go on to actually configure your toolbar.

Available Applications

There are several applications currently available to choose from:

• Blog Search – Increase pageviews and reader engagment with our own searchbox for your content. Visitors can choose to search your blog or pick from other search engines. Currently, the only alternate option is Google, but I imagine others will be added in the future.
• Translation - Visitors can translate your blog into their native language with a single click. This will help you reach across language barriers and grow your blog’s community.
• Posts Navigator – Not only does Wibiya make it easy for visitors to browse recent posts, but it also provides a Random Post button. This works something like StumbleUpon, but limited to your own posts. These two features will serve to make your blog stickier, keeping visitors interested longer.
• Live Notifications – Broadcast messages to your blog visitors in real-time. This will increase engagement and let your visitors know you’re really there.
• Twitter Gadget – Make your latest tweets available right on your site.
• Facebook Community – This is probably the most powerful feature of Wibiya. It allows visitors to join your blog’s community simply by clicking a Facebook Connect button. They’ll be able to easily share your posts with their friends on Facebook, and can see which of their Facebook friends are already members of your site. There is also a Shoutbox feature so that users can communicate with each other.
• Sharing Tool – This integrates the add-to-any service so that users can easily share your content across a plethora of social sites with a couple of clicks.
• RSS Feed Subscription – The toolbar wouldn’t be complete without a method to subscribe to your RSS  feed, now would it?
• Photo Gallery – This is an interesting application that will allow visitors to browse your Flickr photos using “an immersive photo gallery through Cooliris’ 3D Wall.” Just specify which album to pull photos from.

Custom Themes

Wibiya provides a clean and polished interface that easily melts into the background of your site. Having options for the specific look of the toolbar helps it to be much less obtrusive without a lot of the CSS hacking required with other widgets and toolbars.

Tools and Statistics

One important topic in social media is being able to measure ROI (return on investment). Even as an individual blogger, you will want to know if a specific strategy is benefitting you or your community. Wibiya makes this simple by tracking all the activity that flows through the toolbar. I have a pretty small community over on my blog so far, but here is an idea of what you might see:

Conclusions

By integrating all of these features into one simple toolbar, Wibiya lowers the bar for making your blog stickier and more engaging. It helps you to make your blog much more useful to your viewers. I would like to see Wibiya provide options for integration with Google FriendConnect and other established communities. I would also like to see an open API so that developers can create custom widgets for the toolbar.

To keep up with Wibiya, follow @wibiya on Twitter.