Another content aggregator launches publicly today, this one with the aim of bringing all of the user generated content you upload across the web into one place where you can organize, search, and share it more easily.
The site is called Second Brain and takes advantage of APIs provided by the likes of Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and eleven other web services. With each, you can provide your username and password, and Second Brain will start keeping track of the content you post there. This content can be kept private or shared with others.
The service is essentially a social network for sharing UGC with friends, which in a way makes it a more advanced version of the website sharing functionality you’ll find on Facebook and other social networks.
Public content sucked into Second Brain shows up in the recent updates areas of your friends pages and the homepage. All content can be categorized, allowing for the grouping of similar content found across different web services (Flickr photos and YouTube videos about technology, for example, can be grouped together on Second Brain). You can also comment on all the content brought into the site, allowing discussions to form around people’s contributions.
I can see this service appealing to people who upload content to several destinations around the web. However, I also expect more established social networks to eventually allow you to automatically pull in, say, all your Delicious bookmarks automatically and share them with your friends. Wait a minute, you can already do this with a Facebook app. And Facebook has announced that it’s opening up its news feed to third party services. Oh well.
Second Brain isn’t exactly charting new territory – FriendFeed, Spokeo, and Iminta are three others that already have been trying to solve the problem of content dispersion. Second Brain founder Lars Teigen argues that they are taking things much further than those other companies by building a more comprehensive library of users’ content. Imported items retain their tags, which are used to create a “meta-tag cloud” of all different types of content. Content can be indexed and searched in more advanced ways, and the company is working on two-way data push capabilities so that you can not only retrieve content from other web services but update it from Second Brain as well. With these longer term features in mind, Second Brain hopes to be your go-to destination for all UGC management.
Below is a promotional video for Second Brain: