MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site – it shows pictures and names of recent visitors. The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well. Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor. The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there. → Read More
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 → Read More
