The Next Web

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.

I hope you like that post!

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aggregating, Lars Teigen, library, secondbrain

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Plaxo: another week, another product

Written on February 2, 2008 – 2:33 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

I don’t know what they feed the developers at Plaxo but they just keep on coming up with new products and services. We have written about Plaxo a lot here at The Next Web Blog and there are two reasons for that. We like their service and they produce a lot of news.

Just today Plaxo launched a new feature titled ‘Plaxo Personal Card‘. It brings together all your publicly declared feeds or “me links” with the aggregated stream of content from Pulse. Also, it happens to be the first application of the new Social Graph API from Google which was released yesterday, as you can read on TechCrunch. As the guys from Plaxo say: “Now you can share with others one site that pulls all of your online worlds together.”

Sounds pretty fancy, and it actually is, since this means that they’ll compete with LinkedIn from now on. They both offer a public profile, combined with a network of your business contacts.

Plaxo has the advantage of offering a public profile and several syncing services, of which the address book function is the best. Yet LinkedIn seems more suitable for professional networking. Not everybody wants their potential boss or business relation to read your Twitter feeds or to watch those Flickr photos of that awesome party last night. You’d like to save that till you know them better. Of course, you could choose to leave the pictures and tweeds out, but what’s left then?

If you keep all those functions, Plaxo seems like the perfect way to gather all your published on-line content. And they’ve released it just in time, since Netvibes will soon launch their ginger version that includes the ‘My Universe’ option. As you can see on this screenshot of the closed beta version, it’s kind of similar to the Plaxo profile. But it’s not presented as a stream.

As we all know, combining and aggregating our on-line content that is now still scattered around different services is THE trend of 2008. Plaxo is one of the most innovative services in that field right now. And as long as they keep that up, we’ll keep writing about them.

aggregating, ginger, linkedin, netvibes, plaxo, professional networking, social networks, stream

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