Conduit Browser Toolbars Share Content with MillionsJune 23, 2009

What service has 60 million active users online? If you immediately thought "social network du jour" well, that's only natural. But according to Conduit the answer is "community toolbars" on Web browsers. Conduit should know; it makes tools that let Web publishers big and small (from sole proprietorships up to organizations like Major League Baseball and TimeWarner) create personalized toolbars that do amazing things.

The cost: free. The tools: entirely online, easy for anyone to access. Unlike with the popular Yahoo or Google toolbar, users don't have to upgrade and install new software every time a new function is available. New items from the publishers appear on the existing toolbars.

The problem, of course, is that once you have one or two toolbars installed, you typically don't want more. They get confusing and take up too much browser screen real estate. Conduit's hopes to solve that problem via its new Conduit Open Initiative, letting publishers share content and applications across toolbars.

Company president Adam Boyden calls Conduit Open a concept that will increase the level of co-operation between publishers, rather than foster competition to see whose toolbar stays. A publisher can contribute something to the Conduit Open marketplace (for example, an MP3 file from eMusic) and any other publisher could pick it up to show or re-sell. Of course, this puts the users in the hands of eMusic, even if they accessed it from a toolbar from Travelocity, or vice versa.

The end users still gets to control a lot of what's on the toolbar, at least on the right side. On the left, the publisher gets to make offers that change on a regular basis. (Tell the boss: this could get your content out to people who forget to come back to your site.) With the Open Marketplace, in theory that content also could reach another 60 million users.

Conduit will also launch 2go branding, a "share-this" button for publisher Websites that lets end-users add content to Conduit toolbars. If the users doesn't have Conduit-based toolbars active, it provides the option to install the toolbar.

How does Conduit provide all this for free? The profitable company gets by with money from Google, which it gets by putting Google search boxes in the toolbars.