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.
How is it very different from friends feed ?
It is vvery buggy
Competition is good, let us see just how cliqset develops in the marketplace. If they can get some momentum and consistently get the word out, it may give an honest run at FriendFeed.
hats off… This is a lot of dev for the given finances.
If u think its a lot of dev, u shud look at Arktan…no funding, just 2 co-founders working so hard, always responsive to requests from beta users and finally making a great product!
After reading this article and checking out cliqset, my respect for Arktan and its co-founders has gone up a lot. Now I really want to tell the world abt arktan http://www.arktan.com
Kudos to the Arktan co-founders
Hmm, looks very familiar. Gotta check it out.
This is crap. Spent 5 minutes and can’t do anything on the site!
1. Cannot update my status, it just vanishes into thin air…refreshing the page also din’t help!
2. Cannot upload any photos.
3. Wrote a comment and it doesn’t show up until I refresh the page.
I thought it was supposed to be realtime…
Forget about the bugs, I cant even figure out how to use the site.
Had similar issues in my first experience.
@rajesh, have u tried http://www.arktan.com ? If not, u must. Neat design, cool features and above all very responsive co-founders.
Really? It works really well for me. What web browser are you using?
I just had a conversation with 3 friends on there. It’s definitely real time.
I used Safari. Go to a single item page and write a comment. The comment counter increments but the comment doesn’t show up. Cannot upload images from the homepage still.
Do you call this realtime?
Hi Rajesh,
That’s definitely not a typical experience. In fact, none of what you described should have been happening.
Shoot me an email at darren cliqset.com. Would love to hear what exactly happened and get it addressed. It’s certainly not something we want you or any other user to experience.
@John, Thank you for your compliments. Its always a nice feeling to hear from happy users like you
I think Cliqset has done a nice job, Techcrunch will not be reviewing them otherwise. Would like to congratulate @Darren on this launch.
@Leena – That was a nice review. I would like to know if its possible to review Arktan as well. We are in the same space, but have some really cool innovative features which were developed based on the early feedback we got from our users. For more info, please mail me at srikanth arktan.com