TC50: Hark! lets friends web browse, share links together

Hark! is browsing platform that allows many people to surf the web together. The company launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today.

Instead of sharing a link by copying and pasting it into Twitter or Facebook, Hark! lets you “flare” a page, or alert a friend also using Hark! that you found something interesting through its browser plug-in.

As a friend browses the web, a small pop-up will tell them about the page within their browser. If they check the page out, it will let you know and both of you can chat about the content in an overlay on the page. The Hark! overlay can also stream a feed of shared links as you browse other sites.

You can also chat with other Hark! users, who aren’t your friends, about the content if they have the same page loaded. Hark! also aggregates the most widely shared content on the site so it can show the top pages in the network.

Judges at the conference provided some feedback to the company.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn: Downloaded browser plug-ins are hard.

Robert Scoble: I’m not interested in it. I’ve seen this done before and we had similar technology like on FriendFeed and Twitter. I wish I could be more hopeful for you.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook: I would think about virality. There’s a distribution problem you need to solve.

Dick Costolo, Twitter: How do you make it more than a cool novelty feature into a more compelling use of the web?

Sean Parker, Founders Fund: On an optimistic note, I think the concept of a guided, shared way of navigating the web is promising.