StormDriver

Been testing the StormDriver, a webpage overlay that shows you what other people in your circle have been browsing and recommending. Once you have logged in it shows you what others that you follow have been visiting and the pages they think are cool. Although a few thousand people were invited into the testing it seems like only a very few have been using the service on a regular basis. I really like the idea, it seems much more user friendly that Google+, and I have found some really cool sites. You can see how many others in your social circles have visited each site and what they think of it (whether it Rocks or Sucks).

Screen shot of my StormDriver homepage

After a few misgivings, which were all quickly answered by the StormDriver team, I found myself wanting to build up Cred points by visiting and recommending pages that I thought others with similar interests would like. It's not easy to browse the actual web though, it's more to visit sites that others you are following have visited. If you want to post a site then you need to use another browser window and cut and paste the URL rather than just search from StormDriver itself.
It is still in very early testing and the team have been very quick to respond to any suggestions and fix any bugs. It's still quite slow and really, at the moment, it's not making me want to use it. Like Google+ the more you use it the more you will get out of it and so until they open it up and make it a lot faster it's hard to see the point. Also if I want to go to the BBC homepage, for example, it will show me the homepage of a date a couple of months ago. Not a lot of help if I want to browse today's paper. Anyway, if things improve we'll see.
Just got news that I may be testing the new Nokia Lumia 800 for a while, so we'll see how that goes.