Minggl Offers (Yet) Another Way to Keep Tabs on Your Friends
Jason Kincaid
16 comments »
It’s almost painful to write about a social news aggregator these days. We’ve covered well over a dozen of them, most of which do nearly the exact same thing. It’s getting ridiculous. With so many on the market, it goes without saying that most of these are going to fade into obscurity in the next six months.
Which is why I hope Minggl was telling the truth when they told us they weren’t just another event aggregator.
Because right now, that’s basically what Minggl is. They currently offer a browser-based plugin for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that integrates a newsfeed, among other things. After filling out requisite information for MySpace, Facebook, and most of the other major social networking sites, users are also given one-click access to each of their profile pages from their Minggl toolbar. Other features include the ability to mass-send a status message to each network (provided they support one), and the ability to send the same message to friends across multiple networks.
To be honest, I was surprised by how well the sidebar feature worked. I generally detest browser plugins, but the Minggl toolbars did their job without being too intrusive. There are, however, a few annoying quirks that got on my nerves after a while. Whenever you visit a friend’s profile while logged into Minggl, a floating box appears asking if you’d like to add them as a Minggl friend. I’m sure there is (or will be) a setting to turn this off, but it shouldn’t be the default. Minggl also needs to get away from banner ads, which are integrated into their newsfeed sidebar - it just looks tacky.
Besides Minggl’s semi-unique plugin approach to the social aggregator, the company says they have a few more things up their sleeves. First, they plan to offer a set of filters that will allow users to prune their newsfeeds down to the stories that they find most important. If they do it right, this could be a big stepping stone for them, as many of these aggregators often devolve into chaos. Minggl says that they’ve also established a robust infrastructure, and hope to become a social networking platform in the future.
Minggl’s going to have a tough time in the social news aggregator space. They are very similar to MySocial 24×7, a Firefox extension for FriendFeed that we recently covered. If they want to do well, they’re going to have to quickly establish what makes them different, or they will sink with the others.
Won’t install on Firefox 3 b5 because it doesn’t provide secure updates. I know I could do a work around, but I’m not going to. If they want me to use their extension, they need to make it easy to install. Being that FF 3 b5 has been out for some time now, I don’t find it excusable on their part.
I installed minggl toolbar on FF 2 and was amazed at how easy it was to use! This toolbar allows me to easily keep track of my friends even though they are not all on the same sites. I have several on facebook but also many on myspace, twitter and a few on digg. I found the sidebar to be very easy to use. Thanks Minggl!! Great job.
John
Another one? Methinks Orwell was wrong. It’s not Big Brother’s watch we must escape, but Big Others.
I think John works for Mingg
Firefox beta doesn’t work for me either
I am a skeptic, but heard about this site a while ago and have kept loyal (mostly out of curiosity), I have few complaints and I will admit I really like it. I am not going to give a RAVE review until I see them deliver the other things mentioned i this article. If they can pull that off, I will be a huge supporter and fan. I suspect most people who install it will have the same view, since the feedback is consistent with mine. Thoughts?
Won’t work for me either… ahh well. Maybe I shouldn’t join so many social networks.
Yea i could see how it would be useful. But then if we dont know how they process the passwords (whether they run as encrypted strings or are stored as such or NOT?) because i would not want mingle or whosoever but me know my pwds to my social networks. Not that theres anything to loook at either. However while you at it pretty please check out jobspath.com which is based off the free jobberbase engine. Its really awesome, Post Jobs / Search Jobs for free. Mostly right now the site is focused on Healthcare. It is just starting up so feel free to email me any quirks.. and general feedback.
ScottK, beta called beta for a reason.
Looks like they have potential. I admit I’m not big on the social news feeds (Twitter is enough for me. :-), but there is a need for aggregation that is smart and gives the user the control they want.
Fundamentally, Minggl has an advantage over bot/scaper based aggregators like ProfileLink because FB can’t block Minggl.
Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone would build a business that relies on every social networks continuing to allow free and open access to their data. Sure, FB has an API which is great, but that’s the tip of the iceberg of the problem that Minggl is trying to solve– how do you maintain hooks into OkCupid, Ning-based communities, Yelp, Twitter, Linkedin, Bebo, etc. This stuff isn’t useful unless you can aggregate many many communities. And you can’t do that unless you have a browser plugin.
The other interesting advantage that Minggl has is that, like Diigo, and Flycast (from way back in 99), the toolbar creates a “level” above any given web page for social annotations. Users can put Minggl Notes on their page that are only visible to other users, which could then easily include space for ads.
Rajv-
Yes, but their developers should be building for the current and future versions of Firefox. Only making it available on FF 2 is taking a step back.
The ability to classify/tag my different friends and easily send messages to groups is very cool. I use explorer and things work just fine. I would like to see the new features discussed.
Jason,
Thanks for taking a look at Minggl and for your great feedback…we’re working hard on your suggestions.
And I’d like to respond to your position that Minggl is a “social news aggregator”….
We believe that FriendFeed and MySocial are great products, but they are distinctly different from Minggl….not only in features, but in the types of sites we each currently support.
Lets start with a distinction between “newsfeed” style items, and personal, actionable items.
If you and I are both users at Facebook, and you:
1) invite me (friend request)
2) poke me
3) email me (message)
4) wall post
5) send event invite
6) notifications (coming soon in Minggl)
Your FriendFeed friends (mySocial users included) WILL NOT (based on our testing) see this activity, nor will they know that they need to respond to you. The same is true for Social Thing….even if your friends add both of these as Facebook applications (not required with Minggl).
Your friends who are Minggl users WILL receive all this in their MingglStream sidebar (near real time), without ever having to visit the Facebook site or use a separate application.
The same is true for MySpace events, which none of the other aggregators support, and LinkedIn which the aggregators do support (but only at a level similar to Facebook).
In summary, our “newsfeed/MingglStream” (a small portion of our total feature set), offers much more complete support for the big social sites than anyone we’ve seen to date.
Furthermore, none of the “aggregators” give you automatic navigation (including site login) from within your browser, or the ability to tag and categorize friends, or email groups of friends on different sites. Minggl provides an instantaneous way to login to all your accounts, and jump to your inbox (for example) without being bothered with the intermediate page visits. Our next release will let you filter the mstream (newsfeed) based on Site, and Event type. After that, you’ll be able to Filter based on friend tags as well.
And, as you will see shortly, Minggl contains quite a few (currently hidden) features that will further highlight how we differ from the “social news aggregator” category. We consider ourselves to be a much broader social management tool, and intend to lead in the more “personal” dimension of social/lifestyle management.
Thanks for your feedback and for your ideas for improving the Minggl service.
Regards,
Dewey Gaedcke
CEO of Minggl
In response to concerns over the Firefox beta 3, we’re working on it, but less than 1% of the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn communities are using this beta, we’re stabilizing our other services, while letting FF3 stabilize as well. You can rest assured that we’ll have it.