If you are a web application lover, you probably have accounts everywhere in different web services such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. And it could be incredibly hard to remember which service has something you saved or marked as a favorite or bookmarked or dugg or shared via RSS feed. The information you need is with you but spread around in various services with no real structure.
Sometimes, it might be easier to search in Google than finding it from your own favorites beating the whole purpose of saving it in the first place. In other times, you may not get so lucky to remember the right search phrase to land on the exact you link you need.
SecondBrain aims at combining all your social networking web accounts and bring all the data together in one place. It
works by pulling data from your various accounts into your SecondBrain account. It will become your repository of data from various web services pulled together so you can organize them, share them and search them to find what you need.
How does it work?
A lot of the social networking sites and web applications provide public API’s or atleast provide RSS feeds for a user’s content so that someone interested can follow the feeds or interact with the data from elsewhere.
SecondBrain works with public API’s where possible and uses RSS feeds to pull in updated content for an user in other cases. Once added, SecondBrain will keep your account synchronized automatically. Some of the popular services it can aggregate content from at the time of writing this post are:
- Blogger
- Delicious
- Digg
- Flickr
- Google Docs
- Google Reader
- Picasa
- WordPress
- YouTube
- ZohoDocs
After importing your content, you can mark them private or public. Plus, SecondBrain can import tags from various services like Flickr, YouTube etc and you can organize your entire content by tags and collections.
Some thoughts
I like some of the integration such as with Twitter where it imports your content as well as let you post to Twitter from SecondBrain. You could also bookmark urls you come across directly in SecondBrain or via a browser bookmarklet. (added to my favorite browser bookmarklets)
I would like to see some more of my favorite sites integrated into SecondBrain like StumbleUpon, Facebook, PhotoBucket, etc. I am sure they are on to it as I am probably not the first one to request this either.
I like the idea of having an Internet content repository from all my favorite services so I can go back find what I am looking for easily. Plus, I can share all my content with everyone from one place instead of having to find and share with my friends in every service. You can find your friends from your Gmail contacts or invite them easily. One think they have improve on is to tell us in advance that we can only invite 10 people at a time. I can understand why they do this but I just quit with the inviting out of frustration as I spent a good 15 minutes going through long list of contacts and selecting the folks I wanted to invite only to find that I can’t invite more than 10 people at the same time! Atleast I am able to warn you about that. 😉
If you sign up for a SecondBrain account, you can follow my updates at Karthik’s SecondBrain page.
Heh this looks like another great service. If I’m not careful, I could end up spending a lot of time using this.
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Hey Brown.. after a couple of weeks of using it, it just acts as a one-stop point of looking up stuff you have saved through one of these services and not that addictive to just browse through say like for eg. StumbleUpon.
By the way are you on Twitter?
Looks like a great service. It should save users a lot of time.
Miracle Blade’s last blog post..Portable Solar Charger
Good to know, I was not aware of this service.
Onlywire seems to provide a somewhat similar service, might also be worth looking into.
Joyful Digesting’s last blog post..Parents: Pack a Meal That Won’t Upset Junior’s Tummy!
Thanks for sharing this great information! I think this is another thing that we should look forward to. I haven’t heard about this, but I want to give a try and see how does it work. 😉
Martin Welch’s last blog post..Dr. Martin Welch Research Works!
Thanks for the heads up Joyful.. I’ll check it out even though that’s a bookmarklet for all services and the concept of Second Brain is different.
Martin, you are absolutely welcome!
All the content in one place. This is great.
Madhur Kapoor’s last blog post..The most expensive iPod
Hey Karthik – thank you for your kind words about Second Brain. We’re working hard to add more services and make our features more intuitive to use. Also we’re working on several upgrades that’ll make the browsing/explore experience more rewarding – help you find people through content and content through people.
Our goal is to solve the problem of content disparity by helping people build personal content libraries online.
Sorry about that annoying gmail bug. We’re going to do a small service update tomorrow and now you will be able to invite up to 100 of your contacts at once. Pls give it another try 🙂
We also plan to support general RSS soon which will extend our service capabilities significantly.
If you have any other suggestions, pls let me know – we want to have a close dialog with our users.
Thanks,
Lars
Founder/CEO
Madhur, it is a well thought out web service!
Lars, feel honored that you took your time to stop by and offer some insight into your product! I can see it as a very powerful tool as you add more services in it and I know how hard that has to be as there are literally hundreds of them!
You are well on your way to building a personal content library. I will try the Gmail import again soon. Aaah a RSS feed to my own collection of everything will just awesome! Once again, your service is one of the few I can find myself getting addicted to not just for the ‘coolness’ factor but for function. 😀
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