I was roaming about the World Wide Web as usual when I came across some site with a snazzy toolbar at the bottom of it. It seemed pretty useful with plenty of essentail viral features like Twitter Gadget, Facebook Community button, Feed Subscription menu along with web search, site search and Google Translate. Not only did the toolbar have usability, I observe that it is non-intrusive, not heavy on the site and yet managed to look really cool. I instantly knew that I wanted one! After digging on the features a little bit I came to know it was being provided by Wibiya – a product of Modular Patterns Ltd., an Israeli startup company founded in 2008 which is backed by Dr. Yossi Vardi.

Next I know I was on their site, looking to register my blog and get the cool tool. But I find it’s still in beta, and can only be acquired by invitation. So I did mail them and within 24hrs, I got the invitation. As you can see at the bottom of WebbyZone, I’m proudly flashing my latest find – the very useful, very stylish and very viral Wibiya toolbar. And here’s a never before sneak-peek into the admin panel of the still-closed beta of Wibiya and a complete guide to how to use it – exclusively for WebbyZone readers.

What is Wibiya?
In their own words,

Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.

Once you log in following the invitation link, you can update your profile and password, configure the toolbar and get the installation code.

If you are using WordPress platform, Wibiya will come as a simple plugin. Otherwise it also supports other platforms and can be installed pretty easily.

Wibiya Installation Page

Once the installation is completed, you can edit / modify your toolbar online, simply by logging into your Wibiya dashboard and there’s absolutely no need to play around with the installation plugins / codes anymore.

Wibiya Dashboard

As you can see in the snapshot above, the Wibiya dashboard offers you a statistics of your tools that can be broken up into daily, weekly, monthly or all time statistics. This will surely help you understand which tools are being used more and which are not enabling you with a better understanding of visitor behaviour and help you derive important strategies for marketing your blog / site. Another very useful feature that can be used through the dashboard is the Notifications feature. Here you can add any message you want to convey to your visitors, along with a link if required. Now you can communicate with your visitors in a better and easier way.

The dashboard also has a collapsible news update block, which lets you know the recent updates about Wibiya.

Wibiya News Updates Block

You can also enable your Facebook Community from the dashboard and allow your visitors to become your fan in Facebook.

In case you want to add or remove some application, or maybe change the way the toolbar looks, all you need to do is click on the “Edit Toolbar” tab on the top.

Wibiya Application Settings

Here you can change the application settings and modify your toolbar theme.

On the application settings page, you can add / remove any application from your toolbar and modify your feed url, your facebook id etc. Here are the snapshots of each of the application settings -

Wibiya Blog Search Settings

Wibiya Translation Settings

Wibiya Post Navigator Settings

Wibiya Live Notifications Settings

Wibiya Twitter Gadget SettingsWibiya Sharing Tool Settings

Wibiya Sharing Tool Settings

Wibiya RSS Feed Settings

Wibiya Photo Gallery Settings

Wibiya Facebook Community Settings

Wibiya Facebook Fanpage Settings

Wibiya Games Settings

And if all these applications are not enough, Wibiya promises to introduce more soon.

Now that we have covered each and every application settings available as on date, be happy to know that you can choose from several themes to make the toolbar integrate perfectly with your blog / site and get a cool look. Just click on the “Change Toolbar Theme” on the top submenu and you can see several color combinations. Choose the one you want and save it. The toolbar installed on your site will get updated automatically.

Wibiya Toolbar Themes

Additionally, you can choose your favicon, a default Wibiya icon or upload a new icon to be displayed in your toolbar making it more customized.

However, I hope they have a good business model backing up their excellent product as I’d really like to see it go a long way. The photo gallery needs to have more options, now it is only taking Flickr into account. And finally, the toolbar themes need to have a custom color options. With that, I must say, it is by far the most customizable, user-friendly and best looking toolbar I have come across.