I am wary of posting new service ideas as usually they are already thought of and in some cases in Beta already as evidenced by the Taggr idea and the new Gataga service in beta !
Anyway since I've been using the new MSN Messenger I like the way I can see what people are listening to and vice versa (and I know they weren't first but it's my chosen IM)
Also I use Bloglines like many of my friends do and we subscribe to some of the same feeds and share info back and forth, I'm thinking it would be cool to see what pages my contacts are browsing too, now of course that raises a lot of privacy concerns but in any new socially aware service you will get this, simply sort it out with Opt in, blocking, levels of visibilty etc ( I deliberately simplify that bit for now as it's just an idea not a product description)
In your IM client the current URL displays next to / under music being listened to, perhaps a little drop down of most recent, the UI could get complicated but should be easy enough to figure out.
The fun bit could be when you start to aggregate the data across all your buddies, start to see popular pages rising to the top, who's going where, any trends emerging ? Also you could add a feature to the browser to allow you to mark a particular URL as hot and this would show up in the IM list letting your buddies know they should go take a look. Of course there should be one to allow you to not publish/display a site if you've ended up at a pr0n site by mistake due to your pop up blocker failing
I did a quick search and found some IBM research but it's more related to the nature of social browsing so I may still have something, I'm sure my mate Imran will correct me though, especially as he is my only subscriber .....
ikisai
