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July 10, 2000 (8:30 AM EDT)

Those who have always wished they could bring a friend along to an online store to get some advice on whether those lime green pants are for them can now rejoice.

There is software that lets you and selected pals rove the Web together to shop for everything from those pants to a new house.

"Shopping is the killer application, especially with young consumers who are likely to be online," said Ekaterina Walsh, senior analyst at Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass.

Using this technology, online stores can combine the social experience with the convenience of being online, Walsh said.

"Very often, I go to the store alone, but I also go with friends, with my children," she said. "These technologies also give the retailer point-to-point customer contact. Their rep can guide me in my journey. They can enhance the online site with the off-line customer service."

That old-world customer service touch is growing in importance as the bloom fades from the e-commerce rose, analysts said.

"Retailers are forced to find better, effective, streamlined ways of finding customers the product they need and they need to emulate as much of the offline experience as possible," said Lydia Loizides, Web technology services analyst at Jupiter Communications, New York. "These technologies are appealing in that way."

The vendors in this space couldn't agree more.

"With most shopping sites, it's like walking around shopping malls that have been neutron bombed -- there's lot of merchandise, but no people around to give it context," said Steve McGeady, a former Intel executive and now chairman of Sidetalk, one of the companies in the group browsing market.

While at Intel, McGeady was fascinated with the prospect of making the Web more of a collaborative tool.

"At the Intel lab in the mid-90s, we started experimenting with tools that would let our engineers share information about journal articles," he said. "We prototyped things that never went anywhere from the Intel product perspective but illustrated the basic notion that if you were to measure people's traversals of the Web, it could help you visualize how information was connected across the Net."

Such group travels could help members find interesting things on the Web that they might never have otherwise found, McGeady said.

Sidetalk, Atlanta, offers downloadable software that enables people to take a group tour of the Web. The software presents itself as a sidebar on the user's browser top and stays with the user wherever they go.

"The first time I used it, I watched people go on the Web together and shop for a wedding present," said Andrew Dietz, CEO of Sidetalk. "It's the kind of thing people typically do now, only they'll both be on the Web talking to each other on the phone."

Context is key.

"Wherever they go, we present related information -- where can they go next?" Dietz said. "It lets you create groups. Co-browsing is a real-time interaction, but we can also provide non-real-time or asynchronous capabilities. Users can create their own groups and bulletin board postings."

Realtors can lead online house tours for prospective buyers. A family considering a car purchase can take a look at new models together even if one of them is away from home.

And tour leadership is transferable -- the leader can turn the tour over to a participant.

The company is working with partners to create branded versions of the product. In late June, it announced partnerships with MXG Media and CollegeMusic.com, both youth-focused websites, and BootsAll.com, a travel site that will use the software to let users share online tours.

Sidetalk is not alone. Hypernix, based in Tel Aviv and New York, makes Gooey, which fosters "dynamic roving communities which give netizens the opportunity to interact and communicate anywhere on the Web," according to the company's site. It has partnerships with RollingStone.com and Hasbro Interactive.

The appeal of such co-browsing applications is lost on some observers, however.

"Why would you want to do this?" said Jonathan Gaw, research manager at IDC, Framingham, Mass. "Part of the beauty of the Web is that it's asynchronous, that you don't have to be together. Why would you want to do this instead of just e-mailing the URL?"

What will determine the vendors' success over time is the size of the application and technological barriers.

"Is it PC only? Do I need a specific browser?" Loizides said. "It has to appeal to a broad user base."

A likely scenario over time is that some of the group browsing technologies will be bought up by or merged with instant messaging or chat companies, analysts said. A natural fit for Sidetalk and gooey is AOL's Instant Messenger or a competitive offering, observers said.

What these group Web activites and the tracking of them do, vendors say, is make sense of the Web and present to users valuable and worthwhile sites and services while weeding out the unworthy.

"There are a lot of interesting pieces out there," Walsh said. "Sidetalk, Gooey... The problem is they're all separate from chat, etc. If there were a way to combine all these capabilities, that's the key. What these [group browsing companies] need is what Winamp provided for Napster. You need Winamp to play MP3 files. Something like that has to happen with Sidetalk. Napster is the content, the real meat, but Winamp is the bread that holds it together."