San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta on Tuesday. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs. There are other services that are very similar – FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo. For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once. It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing. Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) – I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October. You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends – we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here). → Read More
Pulse, which launched earlier this summer, is Plaxo’s foray into social networking. After years of collecting users’ contact information and address book contacts, they took the next step and created a social network around all that data. One of the big features they added was a place for users to add information about what they are up to on any of dozens of other social networks – sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, etc. You then see a news feed on your Pulse pages that includes information on what your friends are up to. It’s very much like the news feed on Facebook, except its based on third party data. Tonight they’ve launched a way for users to take that personal social network data and include it on another website via a widget. Once you have a Pulse account and have entered in a few of your feeds, you can grab the widget here. A RSS feed for this information is also available. 30Boxes may have been the first startup to innovate in this space. FriendFeed, an unlaunched startup we covered earlier this month, is also doing something very similar, as will other startups. I’ve embedded the Plaxo widget below. → Read More
PBWiki is on a bit of a roll. After confirming a $2 million round of financing last week, they’ve just launched a partnership with 30Boxes that allows users to insert a calendar into a wiki. Actually getting the calendar into the wiki requires way too many steps, and I agree with 30Boxes founder Narendra Rocherolle that this should be made into a template option, as Jotspot did in 2006, shortly before their acquisition by Google. Wikis are basically commodities at this point. There are dozens of hosted and unhosted versions to choose from, and revenue models are pretty thin. PBWiki has a loyal following of users, though, and has spent very little money getting to where they are today. We’ll see how they do over the next year. → Read More
30 Boxes is an online calendar application that is targeting the mainstream consumer market who until now have not adopted calendaring online or offline. 30 Boxes is another contender in a very crowded market (as previously noted on Techcrunch) which has recently confirmed Google as the latest entrant (also seen on Techcrunch). 30 Boxes has some strong differential points and the team has implemented some great ideas that make online calendaring simple to use. I have been using it for over a week now as my primary scheduler and have been impressed enough to continue to use it. My previous attempts at online calendaring using some of the other apps now available (Kiko, CalendarHub and Airset) all failed after a few days, but 30 Boxes is hanging in there for me. There are a few reasons why, and they are good differentials that 30 Boxes has over the current competition. The first is natural language schedule additions – how this works is to add a meeting or appointment I enter something like ‘meeting with investors at 3pm tomorrow’ and it will create that meeting. If I wish to invite somebody else to the meeting I add +friend@friend.com to that string and it will send them a notification. This might sound complicated to learn but with the random examples below the entry box you quickly pick it up and get to learn what can be done. The interface itself is very simple – it is a calendar view and you can click on any day to view appointments (which can also give you a print view – handy when you want to print out your appointments for the day and take them with you) or easily edit the details or add further detail. You calendar has a private view (which you see), a shared view (your buddies view of what appointments they have with you) and a public view (to include in your blog or anywhere else, you can mark appointments as public/private). It was a combination of the nice interface, usability and these simple features that have made 30 Boxes my default calendar now. I can see why they already have 22,000 users and adoption outside of the usual early adopter circle. More advanced users will enjoy the complete openness of 30 Boxes – they are rolling out an open API that allows full unrestricted access to your calendar, allow → Read More
San Francisco, CA
