AOL’s Surphace Goes Self Serve With Private Beta Of S4

Surphace, previously called Sphere, is an excellent tool for bloggers and other publishers to add related content to their articles and posts. The company, which was acquired by AOL in 2008, has now released S4, a self serve product that gives smaller sites the ability to use Surphace's more advanced features. More than 2 billion articles per month bring in Surphace content, says CEO Josh Guttman. Until now only the largest publishers were able to tailor the types of related content links, as well as the look and feel of the Surphace widget. Small sites had to make due with a standard pop up Surphace widget that had little flexibility in terms of content and design. Now, sites of any size can customize the size, interface and types and quantity of content that Surphace pulls into posts. The result, says Surphace, is higher reader engagement. Read on for more details and an invite code: