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:
wow..can’t believe im the first to comment..anyway i think the name should change its not catchy enough..it should be just one word..that seems to be the only thing that works online and in big business. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Myspace, facebook oh yeah Techcrunch just to name a few..
Odd to see an arrival this late to the UGC aggregation party with feeds from only 11 services. The list of sites doing this and more with far greater number of feeds would not be complete without Plaxo Pulse, which launched last August, and offers aggregation from over 30 sites, public profile pages, a lifestreaming widget, and more…
The promotional video looks aww! Good concept.. and yea.. as Uway says.. the name doesn’t sound cool..!! Probably they should have selected more appropriate one
…IYouWe.com or IUV.com ? LoL!
The site looks amazing but the question is will it generate critical mass. Only time and investor interest will tell
Peyton
http://www.techbanyan.com
@Uway
Not that I want to nitpick, but Microsoft, Myspace, Facebook, and Techcrunch are all 2 word names. Your examples don’t support your theme…
As for the site, I can’t wait to get 3-times removed from the original UGC site when the inevitable “organize your content aggregators from around the web in one place.”
Landing page = Error Message
Epic fail!
@Uway
Maybe it could be called SecondBrain - combine the two words together.
The promotional video is better than the site. Of course, the site is down. Bandwidth trouble due to this TechCrunch review? With $1 million in funding already, bandwidth spikes/server issues shouldn’t be happening.
I need a 2nd brain!
Two points:
First the name is Second|Brain. It is one word or two words with only a character between them. It is not Second Brain.
Second, the point of Second|Brain is rather different than Plaxo. Second|Brain is designed to make it possible to help bring order to all of your online materials. Plaxo’s pulse is just a list. It may be based on more sites, but it is only a long list. Second|Brain also lets you bookmark any webpage directly to your collection on the site, which means you can put almost anything there. Second|Brain does tags that can be searched, and it does collections or categories. And it lets you do searches for specific types of files. Pulse does a number of things Second|Brain does not do. The two serve quite different purposes.
As for the error message. I suspect that is a function of too many visitors at once. I have been using it for several months without that happening — until just now.
@John McCrea:
Second Brain has been around in a few different versions since mid-last year. I first came across them after a R/WW review in May 07 I think. It used to also host user-uploaded content like pdfs and have the ability to embed your own collections, but these features haven’t survived what I believe is now beta 3 of Second Brain.
It does need to open up to more services or, alternatively, allow import of RSS feeds rather than only patching in to other APIs. There’s promise here, but the lifestream aggregator market is starting to hot up and if it doesn’t differentiate itself soon, it will get lost in the crowd.
I’ve got a review of it up on my site at the moment if anyone is interested (however unlikely that might be) and if anyone wants to see what a public collection looks like, jump to http://smperris.secondbrain.com/collections/732606 which is just an example of pulling in content from Flickr and YouTube I did as a test drive while looking at how it all works.
We’ll soon need a content aggregator for all the content aggregators out there.
@ uway
you need a brain first before you comment
I like the name and the website. I’m not sure what all the negativity is about. The only flaw with any service like this is the lack of two-way data push capabilities… but as they say, they are working on it.
I think we have an under the radar winner. If they can monetize it creatively and non-irritatingly this could be an explosive service.
I’d keep an eye on it.
so seriously, looks nice BUT of all the nerds and geeks using these sites, how many people do you really think will ever use any of these aggregators? it’s enough to get people to even build personalized home pages with widgets (a minority of folks) but now this? enter tons of sites, usernames, passwords, set up accounts at all of them, etc…really, these sites are being built for about 10 to 50 thousand user each, and that’s it - so how will they ever make money? (that’s rhetorical)
…but isnt that what iGoogle, pageflakes or Netvibes is for? Soon, you’ll have aggregators of aggregators…lol. No wonder why we going to need Open ID.
But do you *own* your content? Or, like all the other services in the space, are you owned [by Second Brain]?
Interesting web site, but it is pretty limited to content aggregation.
Check out http://www.traackr.com
Aggregation is just the beginning on traackr.com. Once you register with traackr we track your content on multiple web sites and help you discover what works, what doesn’t and how to attract more viewers.
See also how other users similar to you are doing: http://www.traackr.com/user_profiles/explore
Thanks for the review Techcrunch.
Second Brain is going to become a home for all the content that you have online. We focus on APIs because we want to provide two-way capabilities, but we also want to support simpler services where RSS may be just enough to tap into it. Expect several more services in future iterations.
Lifestreaming is just a small feature of Second Brain. We want to compete with the rest of the crowd in providing better tools for publishing, organizing and searching your online content.
And when the service has matured, we hope to become a good starting point for people outside the web2.0 crowd looking for an introduction to all the social services out there.
This is a big idea, and we’re working on it step by step.
@Thanks to Bob, Shane and Fitz.
So this is Plaxo but with fewer 3rd party websites?
I think the site is very pretty: modern and easy-to-understand
Second Brain? This is weirdly reminiscent of Third Voice — the 1998 startup from Singapore that was supposedly gonna revolutionize the web.
Actually, for those who don`t remember it, Third Voice had a pretty unique technology. It allowed anyone to register and leave what amounted to virtual graffiti — comments, notes, reviews, etc. — all over any website. The notes were only visible to fellow Third Voice registrants, however.
They got millions and millions in VC funding, and then the site vanished in the dot com bust.
Which makes me wonder how long startups like Second Brain — which admittedly offers something vastly more pedestrian — will last.
Hi,
I posted a couple of days ago on the coverage of evernote - we’re also developing a similar product to secondbrain.com at the moment, called spheers.com. It will initially be a much more anti-social product, i.e. it’s a simple set of tools for sorting and organising your OWN knowledge. It was born out of the frustration of knowing that I’d read or seen something, but couldn’t find it again.
We’re a small team based in London. If you’d like to get involved in helping us build a great product please check out http://www.spheers.com, we’d love you to sign up for the beta.
thanks,
Andrew
http://www. i-guide .ro
http://www. i-guide .ro
http://www. i-guide .ro
http://www. i-guide .ro
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.
These sites are not the only ones that help people manage their internet lives. I use an online password manager called Mashed Life. I just go to http://www.mashedlife.com and log in there. At this website, I store my log in information for all of my other web accounts for easy log in. Their one-click log in feature allows me to access all of my other sites with just a few click. The best part is, it works for any site, just not a select few like Second Brain. Go and check it out.