YouBundle Offers Yet Another Approach to Social Bookmarking – and an Interesting One at That

YouBundle is a new startup that is launching publicly today at the i-stage - the contest where the prize for the best application or gadget is a booth at CES to showcase the technology to the general public.

Like the name suggests, YouBundle is about collecting things - this time things from around the web, be it general web pages, videos or photos. Basically you as a user choose the subject for your bundle and use the bookmarklet every time you want to add some piece of content to the bundle you are building on that subject.

Basically YouBundle can be described as yet another way to organize your bookmarks - this time with small collections (or bundles) based on a certain topic or type of content. The team also promises to launch an embeddable widget in the coming days so that any bundle could be embedded into a blog post or a profile on social network just like a video from YouTube. This widget will show content from the bundle to all the visitors and when the bundle is updated with new content by the owner, the widget is updated as well giving fresh content to site visitors constantly.

In the future the team also promises to add the functionality for joint editing of bundles where multiple users will be able to add links to the bundle with the owner approving or declining them (depending on the settings, of course). This creates an interesting opportunity for multiple users to work on the same piece of content that can appear anywhere online - from working groups to share knowledge on a project to multi-author blogs or some niche communities that want to entertain their visitors with constantly updated content collected by the team from around the web.

Judging by the press release I received, the startup seems to be particularly proud about launching with a revenue model from the very beginning. For monetization, YouBundle displays contextual ads from Amazon and eBay at the bottom of each bundle so if someone makes a purchase after arriving to the e-store from the bundle, YouBundle will get its share. In the future this will also be enhanced with additional functionality like sending people to buy music on iTunes from a music bundle. There is also an opportunity for sponsored bundles to appear on the site as featured bundles in the future - similar idea to how Netvibes monetizes the widgets.

To me right now the idea does not seem to be particularly new as in its core YouBundle is imply yet another way to bookmark pages and organize them. But the opportunity is here, of course, as the traditional social bookmarking tools don’t seem to offer new innovative approaches so YouBundle could be the company to offer this innovative approach.

Here is the video describing how YouBundle works for those of you preferring the video format to writing:

YouBundle.com Introduction from YouBundle on Vimeo.