It is quite difficult to show your friends an element on a webpage exactly as you want it. Similarly, it becomes almost impossible to show each website you want to share if there are many links you want to share.
For this, there are tools which will let you surf the Internet together with your friends. We will discuss two services for this purpose.
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Channel.me
Channel.me is a free service for sharing whatever you are browsing in real time. You can invite as many friends to the browsing session as you like. Using Channel.me is as simple as a few clicks. To start a new session, go to Channel.me and click on the “Start a new session” button. A pop-up will appear with your session number. You can share this session number with anyone you want to share your session with.
Next, you should start surfing the Internet using the Channel.me webpage, where you can input the URL and browse the Internet.
Friends who get their session number should go to Channel.me and enter session no. and press the “Join” button. This will add him or her to your active browsing session.
Channel.me includes features like annotation and text chatting, which make it easier for people to communicate exactly as they want.
Samesurf
If you want a more advanced tool for collaborating in real-time, Samesurf can be a good choice. Samesurf is a software that allows people to browse the Internet together with their family and friends.
Unlike Channel.me, Samesurf is not totally web based. You will need to download the app and install it on your computer to use the features provided by Samesurf.
Apart from browsing the Internet together in real-time, Samesurf offers many other collaboration features, like connecting to Facebook, Twitter etc. and inviting your friends from there, mouse tracking, audio and video chatting etc. You can also share your full screen, in addition to just a browser window.
Samesurf supports annotations on the screen. All participants can scribble on the screen to participate actively in the conversation.
Co-Browsing.NET
Co-browsing.net is another wonderful service for people to jointly browse a website remotely without any downloads or plugins.
Using co-browsing.net is fairly simple. Just open the website co-browsing.net in your browser, enter the website you want to browse together, and press the Co-Browse button. This will generate a link that you can share with your partner.
Both users will be able to see the mouse cursors of each user in real-time. This way, you can easily surf together.
Do you browse the Internet with your friends in real-time? What are the purposes for which you want to surf the Internet together?
5 comments
Jonathon Atkins
I tried Surfly and it didn’t work on most sites. Sorry to disappoint.
Carrie Simons
It had the same issues with Surfly. I tried the new version of Samesurf and it worked really well. It didn’t require a download.
Nicholas Piël
Thanks for the overview!
You should definitely add Surfly.com to this list. It is really a great way to surf together on the web, work very fast and works on any website.
Usman Khurshid
Surfly seems to be a good choice. I haven’t tried it completely but it seems better than both the apps shared in the article. One thing that I wanted to ask if we can use Surfly on the fly without having to create an account?
Nicholas Piël
The people you invite to your session will not need to have an account. You could for example send out a tweet containing your surfly link and everybody can join in on the fun.
The person who controls the session currently still needs to create an account – but we’ll simplify this by adding social sign in.