Vysr RoamAbout, a browser add-on for contextual search that launched earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo is opening up its service for developers this morning. CEO and Founder of Vysr, Guda Venkatesh says he wants the platform to be a veritable sandbox for developers, with the hopes of making it a profitable experience for both parties later down the line.

The add-on tucks a small sidebar in the corner of your browser, letting you highlight text and quickly search various Web services to find out more–all without leaving the page. Lately I’ve seen a few publishing services that let content creators do this (see Apture and Zemanta) , but Vysr’s solution is more voluntary, and aimed at users who want to look things up from very targeted services without having to rely on the built-in search box in their browser. To a certain degree Vysr is an attempt to ween users off of that for the sake of productivity.

The GrooveShark application on Vysr will lookup bands or music tracks just by highlighting them in your browser.

(Credit: Vysr, Inc.)

Venkatesh says it will be an uphill battle to attract developers to build and maintain plug-ins, but after having watched Facebook’s platform launch he told me he thinks the overall simplicity of building a Vysr application will attract bootstrapped developers who have put more care and finesse into their apps. One of the new ones for today is a music search module that will look up any word or track name you highlight and cross reference it with GrooveShark Lite. When found it will play the track in the corner of your browser while you continue to surf around, making it a pretty good addition to something like reading an album review.

As mentioned earlier, Vysr will eventually have ads as part of the equation. According to Venkatesh they’ll only be on the little application overlay windows and not on the sidebar itself, meaning you won’t be randomly surfing a page and getting advertisements. My guess is that most people will be willing to tolerate them for the convenience’s sake.

If you’re a developer looking to get your service integrated, you can check out the documentation here. Venkatesh says it only took 10 minutes to port over GrooveShark, so you might be able to get yours done during a bathroom break.

More: continued here

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 3:07 am and is filed under Web 2.0 Applications, Web 2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.