Israel's Hypernix sees a big hole in the Web surfing experience: There's no easy way for people who are simultaneously browsing a site to chat.
"When you go to a Web site, you are alone," said Hypernix chief financial officer and marketing head Yaron Zilberman. "When you go to places in real life, you expect people to be there."
All those Web pages, all that browser traffic -- and all that silence.
To change that, Hypernix put US$4.7 million in first-round financing to work Monday with the launch of a new Web add-on, Gooey. The software links a visitor to a Web site with other visitors and lets them strike up a conversation.
"This really humanizes the Web, from a collection of pages to a lively environment," added Ron Guetta, Hypernix's creative director. "Surfing becomes a social act."
If a Web browser were a shark, Gooey would be its chatting suckerfish that goes along for the ride, hoping to share in what is found.
The software attaches one well-worn Internet application, real-time chat, to another, Web browsing. The twist is that the chatters automatically have something in common: the Web page they're reading.
"When you go to a Web site, you have a specific interest.... When other people go to the Web site they have the same common interest, by definition," said Zilberman.
The Windows-only application displays a list of the other Gooey users who are currently visiting a particular Web site. That means, of course, that its success depends on widespread adoption by Web users. A one-week "pre-launch" of the service has attracted about 150 users so far.
Users can chat about the site at hand and, if they wish, roam with their Gooey pals to other sites. The software also displays a continually updated "HitWave" list, which shows the 20 most densely populated Web sites among Gooey users at any given moment.
People who download the free Gooey software pick chat nicknames that protect their identities.
The company even has a new acronym for the experience: DRC, or Dynamic Roving Communities. That's their term for what they hope will be a new layer of Internet experience, like email, Web browsing, and Usenet. DRC, which plays off the acronym for Internet Relay Chat (IRC), refers to groups of people chatting in the context of a Web site.
