Cliqset, a Friend-Feed-like online identity platform has gone through several iterations but perhaps third time is a charm. Cliqset’s most recent platform tried to stitch together the social web by allowing users and developers build, organize and share social information across a wide variety of services. Similar to Friend-Feed and other social media aggregators, users could merge and share status updates, location, photos, and more into one platform. Today, Cliqset is jumping into the stream by launching interactive real-time functionality and redesigning the overall interface of the platform. Because the startup will be going into private beta for the next few weeks, we have 200 invites here.
Cliqset’s primary aim is capture the pulse of conversations happening on the web from and on the platform. You can now pull in content from close to 70 social networks and services, including MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and more. Plus, users can update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose. Users can respond and comment on any type of post in your real-time stream as well.
And Cliqset has added other bells and whistles to its platform, including the ability to filter your stream, thumbnails for photo files or location details (via a map) within the stream, and a heightened set of privacy options that let you control who can and can’t see your streams.
Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, tells me that the platform aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed, with a target audience of users who aren’t as technologically savvy. The platform has a fairly sleek interface and is fairly intuitive, which might help its popularity amongst users. But the real-time social media stream is fast becoming a crowded space with Threadsy, Streamy and others launching compelling platforms. And who knows what Facebook will do with FriendFeed.
Cliqset closed a second seed round, $1.5 million coming from angel investor Derek Mercer, founder and former chairman and CEO of Vurv Technology, a provider of talent management software that was acquired in 2008 by Taleo for about $128.8 million. This comes in addition to an earlier early-stage capital injection of $500,000 by the man, bringing the total invested in the startup to $2 million.