I’ll say it right off the bat: there’s a plethora of ways to bundle all your online identities (i.e. your social networking profiles) and share all of them using only one URL, so I know the one I’m going to introduce isn’t unique any way you look at it. That said, it’s lightweight, ridiculously easy and quick to set up, so you might want to take a look all the same.
The service is called UnHub and it was built earlier this month in just a couple of days, inspired by what sweets brand Skittles was bravely experimenting with using social media on its main website.
What UnHub does is create a persistent iframe bar with tabs for all your online presences (e.g. your blog, Twitter stream, LinkedIn account, Flickr profile, blog comments etc.) linked to a dedicated URL you can easily share with anyone. Examples of this are UnHub.com/MichaelArrington or UnHub.com/BarackObama. This can also benefit businesses: see this example for Josie’s Restaurant. UnHub profiles also come with very basic analytics so you can find out what the most popular tabs for your presence are based on the number of clicks.
The UnHub URL is short and personalized, so I assume a lot of people would find it useful to add to their e-mail signature instead of listing the slew of social networking services they can be found on. This list includes the most familiar services (Amazon, YouTube, Twitter through TweeTree, LinkedIn, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, and so on) and will likely be extended in the future. Soon, you’ll also be able to use your own domain name which will make it even more interesting, and you’ll also get to customize the colors and general look of your UnHub presence.
UnHub is another project quickly put together by the guys behind Yipit, who also built 140it which we’ve reviewed earlier this year.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Here’s a demo video:
These presence services are getting out of control
Looks like skittlr.com
Simple, fast and works well. What more can you ask for?
Looks like a winner.
i think its very nice solve in internet
thank you
I just don’t like i-frames.
Me neither!
We don’t mind i-frames but we understand. We might add another option which wouldn’t use i-frames and instead just be a nice landing page with links to your other accounts. Won’t be as nice a browsing experience but would avoid using i-frames.
In general, I’m glad most sites have abandoned iframes as they often make for a negative user experience. But I have seen some implementations that make sense:
- Facebook opens some articles/videos in iframes and lets users comment on them
- ginx does the same, letting you quickly reply on twitter about what was shared
- google images opens up the source webpage to let you view an image in its original context.
I think iframes can work in specific instances, but only when it makes sense w.r.t. the sites’ core purpose.
Well, what’s next?
An application that can consolidate everything above plus Unhub. It’s like a chain reaction. If someone is having problems with keeping track of all their accounts, don’t open so many. And if you are doing a good job marketing yourself with all these accounts, don’t open another one.
Remember the KISS (Keep it simple, Smartypants) mantra.
There’s a lot of great specialized services out there and people should be able to use the ones they like. I don’t think the answer is to tell people to stop using these accounts. Instead, we believe there just needs to be a better service out there to help people manage and showcase these accounts.
If proficient at HTML/CSS I think it would be better to just have a well developed landing page. That said, this does save a significant amount of time. I might try it for a bit.
Martin,
We completely agree. If you have the time and the skills, a landing page works great. But, most people don’t, so we tried to give people a fast and easy way to replicate the functionality.
I hear you: a few weeks before we built UnHub, I made a landing page like you described. One advantage we saw is that the persistent bar encourages users to check out all your profiles, not just the first one they click on (after which they could get distracted and stay on LinkedIn, FB, etc.)
So if you do create your own landing page from scratch, it might make sense to include an iframe as well.
you guys must be running out of companies to right about because this site is terrible! sorry:)
My God you’re annoying. Go ‘right’ complaints on your own blog instead of polluting the comments.
@Robin: You should not say lillywhite is polluting the comments because of a difference in opinion. 1. It sounds as if you have a special interest in the company.
2. You have personal ‘beef’with lillywhite.
The unhub people are trying to solve a big problem and kudos to that.
I believe they can defend themselves. You are supposed to be objective remember?
Huh? Come in here and say we ‘must have run out of companies to write about’ is polluting in my book. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion about UnHub, but I’m sick of people telling us what we should or should not be writing about.
@ the nigerian … there is always one of these specimens around, telling people what to do, how to do it, etc.
They believe they are so “special” while all they show is their silliness… and limiting thinking abilities.
Booyah, Robin. Love to see someone called out for saying something downright useless. Although the dumber comment was @Oo The Nigerian’s comment that you sound like you either “have a special interest in the company” or “personal ‘beef’with lillywhite.”
Kinda funny, but not smart.
Agreed. Unconstructive and out of order.
I think fellow readers of TechCrunch need to remember that not everyone is a tech geek nor do they necessarily know of all if any of UnHub’s competitors. Clearly this is a significant enough problem if so many people are trying to solve it and frankly, I think these guys have done a nice job of it. Is there money to be made here however- I’m not so sure.
Thanks Ray! That’s exactly how we thought about it.
I think this looks like a great service. Like Ray said that everyone’s not aware of UnHub’s competition – I sure am not.
I think it would be a great idea for me to have an unhub link on my business card/work email signature, to showcase my professional profile on linkedin, my corporate website, and blog.
Similarly, an unhub link for personal contacts which I could put on my personal emails/about me pages on facebook etc.
Definitely a great way to share your relevant info with people.
We’ve been getting similar interesting feedback about having a personal and a professional unhub.
not everyone is a tech geek == this is *TECHCRUNCH*
To clarify – when I said everyone, I meant everyone. i.e. including the 6 billion people who don’t read TechCrunch.
I tested it out, joined. I think it will catch on and wish the development team the best. I personally feel it will work great on mobile platform, which the majority uses anyway. Congrats.
Thanks! We haven’t really been thinking about mobile but I agree with you that it could work well.
Sorry that you are getting all this backlash Vinicius, I myself am creating something exactly the same and the target audience is not early adopters or those who are tech savvy to are everybody else who is ‘other’.
At least I got hindsight into the response prior to launching at your expense :p, but good luck with the venture.
Azzam
No problem, Azzam. Good luck with your project and let us know how we can help.
The response though has actually been pretty positive. After releasing a few projects now, you realize you always get some negative responses.
Hi Vinicius,
you guys did a nice job with this simple little “helper”. No shame in that, and it does actually make it very easy to make a quick and easy landing page “toolbar” that also works on my iphone.
One small suggestion/request:
Add an option checkbox that allows one to selectively open certain links in a new tab (or window) for those sites that have frame-breaker code at the bottom (like Twitter). That way you can still use them as shortcuts on UnHub, but it doesn’t cause one to lose the original unhub page in the browser window.
Todd,
That’s a great suggestions. We added it to our queue. Thanks for the feedback.
Vinicius
This is pretty great stuff. Its simple but I guess thats the point. Check me out: http://unhub.com/michaelmuse/
If Anything, I can take out some of the noise in my blog.
What I hate about social networking sites is that there are just too many and as good as UnHub may be; there is no need for it. If you are struggling to keep up to date and managing your accounts stop opening so many!
We agree that there are a lot of social networking sites out there and that some of them are repetitive. But, there’s also many great specialized sites out there. Facebook, Yelp, Playlist.com, LinkedIn, Last.FM, Twitter, etc. and they all serve a great purpose. Instead of telling people to close their accounts, why not just make it easier for people to showcase their different accounts.
Vin discussed this above, but we think there are a lot of services that do a great job specializing in various aspects (flickr for photos, LinkedIn for professional, etc).
You’re right that it can be a headache to manage all of them. But we thought, instead of trying to convince folks not to use all those services, try to make it easier to show them off.
Are you folks at Unhub thinking of adding a Social Network / Commenting layer to this? A cute tab bar is one thing, creating a community using Unhub is another.
Must say I’m a big fan of FriendFeed, noticed that they were conspicuously absent from the link drop-down.
Either way, kudos for a slick service.
http://friendfeed.com/markobon
We’ve sort of taken the opposite approach to friendfeed, which we think is an amazing service. Instead of taking all of the data from your other profiles and bringing them onto one site, we are taking the opposite approach and just letting people view your other profiles on their own sites.
Also, we just added FriendFeed. No conspiracy there.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hey Marko,
I love friendfeed too – we just added the service to UnHub, thanks for the catch. You can also add custom services using “Other…” in the dropdown.
Thanks a lot for the other idea – we’re thinking a lot about that concept. Right now our priority is staying out of the way of the networks/profiles with specialized functionality.
Jim
Jim, Vinicius — thanks mush for your replies and the quick update. I can think of a couple monitization directions off the top of my head — so I hope to see you guys around.
I think Unhub came up with a good idea to keep track of all our social media sites (thanks to Skittles) but I don’t know if it’s going to be a success. It might end up being just another social media site looking to make money.
http://unhub.com/Shaneogorman/
I cant believe that took me 30 seconds to make. Very cool service.
You can use Qwiji web shows to create your personal or business web-show, and have it all in one URL, checkout my example: http://qwiji.co...how.aspx?sid=56
do people really use this crap?
Wow! this has been some stir up.
UnHub’s doing a part of what my company, Nombray (http://nombray.com), does. For us, domain registration as a key part of the service, since we expect more and more people will want to “own their name” online — we help you build YourName.com as an asset you’d want to keep permanently. We also have lots of design themes; we try to make it easy for you to gather up everything about yourself, and add more via point-and-click editing. Takes just a few minutes, costs just a couple of bucks a month. Check out my site for a quick example: http://andyneuschatz.com/ .
Always interested in opinions… ideally more articulate than “this is crap”… Thanks!
love this service! its brilliance lies in its simplicity… awesome work guys!
I like the simple elegance of what they’ve done. We (Nombray, I work with Andy) believe there is great value in this idea ourselves, as people continue to find themselves spread across different sites and mediums. Here’s my page:
http://chrislunt.com
wow, iFrames sure are making a comeback
good idea and implementation, I just don’t know how many would actually take the time to use it ….
those that have extensive social media profiles and need this sort of organization either have the know-how to sort out their own homepage/landingpage or resort to using a profile page on say, Digg, Twitter, Facebook to store links to their profiles
good luck to unhub tho anyways
You make a good point Chris. Though we have noticed a trend that the non-techies are starting to adopt other profiles other than just facebook. Plus, the fact that Twitter asks for a Web link as one of its basic options really makes people think that they should have a central place to point people to.
The Yipit / 140it / UnHub crew is a smart bunch of guys; congrats to them on this launch – looks very clean, simple, and useful
Awesome, huge fan
Grats!!!
I love Unhub! I have a problem though, it won’t go to my website! Still trying to figure that one out.
Hey Trina,
Got your email. Trust we got everything squared away? Just message me back otherwise.
Thanks for checking us out.
Jim
I like this as a general landing page for my online persona. It gives a quick way to see LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.
Could you add Smugmug to the list of sites supported? While they support vanity URLs, everyone also has a URL of the form xxxx.smugmug.com.
Thanks for the feedback. We’ll add SmugMug to our list.
Hey Andrew,
We’ve added support for SmugMug. Feel free to reach out to us with any more feedback / feature requests.
Best,
Jim
i think its very nice solve in internet