It’s funny. It was just last week that I went on a mini-rant about the seemingly endless wave of social network aggregators we’ve been seeing. Maybe I was just sick of programs that had a lot of potential but didn’t do much to set themselves apart. Because after spending an evening with the newest version of Yoono, I’m quite ready to come out as a full-fledged hypocrite. I think I’ve found a social network aggregator plugin I might actually use.
Yoono’s main draw at this point is its “Friends” widget, which offers all the features you’d expect from a social network aggregator. The widget compiles all updates from Twitter, Facebook, Piczo, Flickr, and Friendfeed, and displays them in a scrollable list. After clicking a person’s name, you are presented with direct links to their profiles, photo albums, or messaging pages, which cuts out a lot of tedious navigation. The widget also features integration with most of the major chat clients (AIM, MSN, etc), along with the ability to send out status updates to any profile. So far, so good (though pretty standard).
What really sets Yoono apart is its slick UI. As you browse through your list of friends, you can mouse-over any contact to get a popup summary of their latest profile and status updates. Hover over any of the thumbnail sized photos shown in the widget, and you’ll see a full-sized version overlayed across your browser, all without ever leaving the page you were browsing.
Besides “Friends”, Yoono offers five other widgets that can be added and removed at will. The most useful is “Discoveries”, a carryover from Yoono’s original incarnation that we’ve described as a mix of StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. The widget analyzes the pages you visit and presents a number of relevant tags and related sites, along with a list of Yoono users who share similar interests. “Web Notes” acts as a rudimentary collaboration tool that lets you drag images, text, and video into the side bar for future reference or sharing with friends.
The rest of the widgets are media oriented, and are significantly less polished. “Photos” allows you to browse Flickr images relevant to the page you’re read, while “Videos” lets you browse through YouTube.
If Yoono has one major fault, it’s that it has too much to offer and not enough space to do it in. Navigating the Friends list within the sidebar is difficult if you’ve got any other widgets open - there just isn’t enough room. Each widget can be broken off of the sidebar into a separate window, but this is only useful if you’ve got some extra space on your screen (and you could just as easily use a desktop client in this case).
Yoono is going to draw a lot of (apt) comparisons to Flock, but as a plugin it might be able to target a bigger market. Yoono is currently available in private beta for Firefox, with an IE version on the way. For those looking to try it out, we’ve got 500 beta invites, which can you can grab here.
Will this NEVER end? As good as this aggregator may be, FriendFeed was an aggregator as well and now this service is grabbing info from that and other services. As long as new social aggregation services keep popping, there will continue to be yet another service that needs to be followed. What we need is one place, say a Social Database, that other services can extend and add information to. Each user could have a “profile” in that, with the DB filing in information from existing services and with other services adding information to it. Basically, an extendable friendfeed I guess. From there, aggregators could compete on UI and features. Forget social aggregation… we need a social database service!
Until a social database service comes, I’m happy to use a tool that integrates with my browser. Sign me up.
Thanks, i will test it out.
Will this slow my Firefox browser down? I love to see this work especially with it can also compliment both my Facebook and Twitter acct. Lol
Thinking about it further, one way to go about solving this problem is through a combination of the OpenID and the data portability initiative. Once all the services are open and there is a unique name that identifies an individual across all (or many services), a social profile could be built from the information from all the different services. This profile wouldn’t have to be all located in one services but could just be compiled on the fly, which would be the aggregators job. Eitherway, something needs to be done.
Nice.. any availability for IE?..
Is it just me or is there a freakishly huge number of startups with nonsense names that contain oo
@Joe T
Are you referring to google ? That’s hardly a startup.
wow,this looks like it can be really helpful.
I’ve been using yoonoo for a long time
I’m sticking with Digsby combined with AlertThingy. I only receive moderate amounts of trash on those two combined. Digsby connects with Google Apps, while most aggregators suck at life, for the most part.
Flock already does this without needing the additional plugin - http://flock.com
@Jim
Why change browsers when you like and can customize the one you use ? Yoono allows you to just remove a feature if you don’t use it; I don’t think this is possible in Flock.
What’s the deal with invites? I signed up when this post went live last night and still haven’t received one…
Yeah the invites don’t seem to be working all that well….
I just got mine !
It really looks good. But there are SO many things… will need some time…
I would like to try the chat widget but I need to find someone who uses it too !
My nickname on it is PFlitsch, if anyone wants to try it too !
It took a while to get my invite but I must say Yoono is very slick. I’m usually not a fan of browsing with an open sidebar so I really appreciate the ability to pop the widgets out of the dock. This is clearly a very early beta release but there’s a lot of potential here.
Hi all,
Thanks for your comments
@Dan Delphin
Yes, we are currently looking into openId/Dataportability/APML etc. and trying to figure out how to integrate them in Yoono. But there are also a lot of stuff we’d like to work on before addressing these issues.
@MyMesh
The IE version shall be available in the coming weeks.
Yes, indeed, it is a beta release and there will be many improvements and changes before it goes public. Thank you for bearing with us.
@14: Ben, sorry for the delay, when we planned the release date/time we had no idea the Sharks would be torturing us w/ a 4OT heart-breaker or that we’d be crying in our beer over what was to become of our Yah”oo” stock in the morning.
@16: Peter (or anyone else wanting to try the photo/video sharing), I’m “dirtythirty” in Yoono.
IE, as well as MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster are all coming very soon. What you see today is built off feedback from the 1.3M users of the previous version of Yoono. Feedback (all of it, we have thick skin) from beta users is valued and evaluated. Send it to support@yoono.com and it will go to a real live human. Maybe even to me since I don’t have the Sharks to watch anymore.
Regan Fletcher
VP, BizDev
I’m surprised it took this long for someone to come out with a slick plug-in aggregator.
When Flock launched, I remember exchanging e-mails with a friend at Mozilla that he thought Flock is going the wrong direction trying to build an aggregation browser instead of of a plug-in approach.
Still no invite……boooooo
is yoono changing its focus?