Library service SecondBrain adds Friendfeed and Facebook
Written on August 8, 2008 – 2:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Norwegian start-up SecondBrain, currently in second beta phase, has welcomed its 10,000th user. In the ideal situation, every user would build its own collections and libraries of content. Not sure if they’re all doing that but I did write a positive review about the service in June. I was charmed by SecondBrain because it collects all your online content in a safe and well-designed place. All it takes is entering your credentials to various services once, and then SecondBrain automatically syncs all your blog posts, bookmarks, Google Docs, Flickr pics, and whatnot every time you log in.
So the service is doing ok, 10,000 users is not bad at all, but the most interesting news that SecondBrain has released lately is that they’ve added integration with ten more services (including FriendFeed, Facebook, (!) Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Qik, Goodreads and Behance). Especially due to the FriendFeed and Facebook integration, SecondBrain becomes a solid archiving tool for all your online activity.
In general, online content is something that disappears with time. Twitter tweets, messages on Facebook walls, and a Qik video are things you might stumble on accidentally after a while. But they’re not properly archived. SecondBrain does store all this content in one place, which is also easy searchable. For me, that’s the added value of SecondBrain: it’s my online library. Like founder Lars Teigen said in a comment on my last post about SecondBrain:
We are definitely going for the organizers and collectors out there and want to be a service where you can build your own personal content library, with all the good content that you collect over time from the various services that you use, and help you organize it, search in it, and share [..]
But what if SecondBrain goes bankrupt?
The only touchy issue is trust. What if SecondBrain ceases to exist? Bankruptcy, crashed servers, you name it. Then my whole library will be gone. I trust them for now, especially since my life doesn’t depend on it. Yet I’m sure not everybody is as light-hearted as I am. So here’s your challenge, Mr. Teigen, convince your potentials users that your service is trustworthy.
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By David Petherick on Aug 8, 2008
Perhaps they should talk to Amazon about hosting using their cloud services?
By Svetlana Gladkova on Aug 8, 2008
Actually my concerns about SecondBrain are in another field. First of all, I don’t understand why an aggregator would need to aggregate content from another aggregator (which they seem to be doing with FriendFeed now). And the second is with their approach to luring people into using their service with the recent MacBook Air giveaway (take a look at my post linked from my name for some details that I have, too long for a comment).
Secondbrain is not just an aggregator, Lana - it’s more complex. It has aggregation functionality to help people import content with ease, but it is mainly a collaboration tool and a content library.
About the contest - I think Phil already explained on your blog the reasons and the rationality behind the voting. I am not sure about the “luring” - I think “rewarding” is a better term. It was clear from the start that the most popular secondbrainiac, with the most interesting collections will win - the question was how to determine popularity. A voting system made sense. That people asked for votes… it’s so normal in social media. I am sure you ask for votes from your readers too when you publish an article on your blog for example - and given the quality of your work, I see no problem in doing so. What I want to say: as long as we all come clean about what we do, there’s no cheating and no luring. In my opinion all Secondbrain users were winners. Too bad that SB didn’t have funds to send us all a MacBook Air. But honestly, Lana, which other company gave away such prizes for people who had nothing more to do than to use SB as they use any other social network?
Mig, thank you for the comment, I think I have expressed my understanding of SecondBrain as a service more complex than an aggregator in my own post. I just think that aggregating aggregated content from FriendFeed is a little scary.
As for the contest, I have seen Phil’s explanation, obviously, but this comment was sent a little earlier. But I still believe it was not the best decision to change the rules and introduce an additional voting step when people expected to get their prizes.
It is just obvious that people always ask for votes when they are put in any type of competition - I have never believed that Digg promotion can be natural and I have stated it clearly in a recent post on the Digg gaming practices. Everyone will have to game any system when put in a situation when it’s the only choice. This is not the problem, the problem is that SecondBrain chose to get people in the service using this voting system, it just does not make sense because getting people in does not make them use the service unless they have intentions to.
As for the prize itself, at the web 2.0 expo in SF in April I witnessed at least 3 giveaways of MacBook Air - and people only had to leave their business cards to organizers, there was no need to register and account or use any service. To me it is not the question of how cool a prize is, it is the question of sticking to the rules to keep everyone happy, especially SB’s most loyal users - those who chose to participate.
By Bob Boynton on Aug 9, 2008
It is a good service, but they still have a way to go when it comes to ‘parting ways’ with users. According to their help the only way to cancel an account is to have them do it. It does not seem like that will scale. Plus there are people who want to be able to take their own content with them to other spots.
But they are still new at the game, and I assume they will figure out that they need to do something about this.
Exactly Bob. After a while, they’ll have to offer a delete button that will do the job immediately.
Actually, I think it is coming this week:) We have been able to handle delete requests manually, but of course, this is not very user friendly. We have no need or desire to make this complicated for our users.
I think an option to delete the account gives people more confidence in our service because they know they can leave whenever they want.
Bob, this is a very reasonable remark but I think some companies have their reasons to stick to personal cancellations only. For example, last Friday I wanted to cancel my subscription to eFax since the free trial was over and I did not see reasons enough to have a monthly subscription to such a service when I need to send a fax or two a month. But I have found out that the only way to cancel a subscription is to call them. This was what I did and as soon as I mentioned that I wanted to cancel my subscription they offered me 2 extra months for free. I believe it is an interesting approach but a little useless because if I don’t really need a service, I will remember to cancel the service 2 months later anyway.
By Lars Teigen on Aug 11, 2008
Your concerns on the security of data is something that regards all services in this space and it is something we take seriously. At the moment we only synchronize with the metadata in 3rd party services. If the content is deleted on the 3rd party service, it will be removed from S|B as well, at least for services with which we have an API connection.
For content that you add to S|B like bookmarks and files, we follow the same industry standards as other services.
We do however plan to introduce a backup feature that would safeguard all your content in your cloud in a separate repository. So if one of your connected services should decide to shut down, you would still have a copy in S|B. But this feature introduces so many technical and legal challenges that it is still only on the idea stage.