With the wealth of social media sites that are coming available to us these days, services that help us organize all that information are going to become more and more valuable. SecondBrain is striving to become the premier service in that department.
Easy Sign Up
Getting started with SecondBrain is a snap. Simply go to the site and select your user name. For example I chose ChrisCree which created my SecondBrain URL of http://ChrisCree.secondbrain.com – easy as typing.
Then just set your password and you can start filling your SecondBrain with content. Right now there are 19 different social media sites that you can dump into your account.
Lars told me this morning that they are working on adding more including the ability to add general RSS feeds like, say, from your blog. He expects they’ll have that functionality in the next month or so.
In addition to the “automatic” content you are free to manual post info and links to your SecondBrain. They even have a handy bookmarklet that you can add to your browser to add sites as you are cruising the web. Once the bookmarklet is installed you can save info to your account that you want to save with just two clicks of the mouse. Very handy.
Build Your Network
After you get your basic content ported into your SecondBrain you can add folks from your network that you’d like to follow. As of right now the SecondBrain community still looks fairly small in their Beta roll out. As of today there are about 5,500 user accounts listed.
You can poke through the list of SecondBrain users based on different criteria such as
- Most Viewed
- Most recently joined
- Most commented
- Most followers
- Featured people
- You Follow
- Your Followers
As you build your network, you share individual items with folks as you go along.
Organize Your Brain
Here is where SecondBrain stands out from the pack of other social media aggregator sites such as FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse. SecondBrain will help you organize your web content in two very specific ways.
First SecondBrain consolidate all your tags from your services all over the web such as StumbleUpon, YouTube or Del.icio.us into one big tag cloud. The call it the mother of all tag clouds though that seems a little over the top.
Right now I can only see about 30 or so tags on my SecondBrain profile. These are probably my most commonly used tags. But a quick look at my Del.icio.us account or my StumbleUpon tags and you see I’ve got a bit more tags than that in use. Even so I’m confident SecondBrain has indexed my tags from the various services because I tested it on a couple tags that weren’t shown and got the expected results.
It is in the ability to create collections of information where SecondBrain truly excels. As you add information to your account you can assign it to a particular collection.
Are you working on a project for work? You can collect links, photos, videos, and even Google Docs all in the same place. SecondBrain aggregates that collection with its own RSS feed so the entire team your working with can all subscribe to it and get updates on new information. They can even come in and add comments to that info so you can have all those ideas in one place.
Or maybe you are looking for a house because you are moving out of town for a new job. But you don’t want your boss to know about it yet? No worries.
That isn’t a problem because you can make a collection private. Doing so will keep everyone out. But, even though it’s private you can still share that collection with individual accounts. So you can let your wife see all those house listings you think would be perfect.
Overall
Overall I think SecondBrain is off to a good start.
Sure there are some features I’d like to see added. For example it would be nice to have the ability to edit and delete your posts if you want to go back and change things. Adding RSS feeds, Embedding YouTube videos directly in your SecondBrain instead of just adding links will make it even more useful.
Down the road, the ability to upload documents and files might be nice too although that would probably create storage issues for them.
If you are looking for a way to organize your online life then SecondBrain may be just what you are looking for.
OK, I was playing around with this yesterday. It looks neat–but how is it different from Plaxo? And what advantages does it have over Flock’s Accounts and Services Sidebar?
Admittedly, I haven’t had much of a chance to explore it yet.
Good questions, Mark. I see them as serving different needs.
Plaxo functions well as an online address book and calender. The “pulse” portion of Plaxo can aggregate your contact’s social media feeds and you can comment on those. But Plaxo lacks the simplicity of organization, tagging and searching that I see in SecondBrain.
Flock is a web browser with a built in portal for the various social media sites. Again, It’s addressing a different need than SecondBrain, more ease of access instead than organization.
This sounds really interesting, and what is surprising is I have never heard of a tool like this, even though now that I think about it, it is incredibly valuable. I have so many accounts and things to do online, having a way to organize would be great. I believe I’ll check this out.
Very interesting. Didn’t think there were organizing tools for your net. Thanks for pointing that out!
Hi, I’m here through highcallingblogs.com
I’ve resisted friendfeed, but with a cool name of secondbrain, I’m in.
Hi Chris,
Thank you for the review of our site and introducing SecondBrain to your community of readers. I think you did a great explanation of our current feature set, and I also liked you recommendations for future development.
We will have a page where you can see all your tags (now we show top30 by default, and related tags when you browse), and that file hosting thing may be here sooner than you’d think.
Like you mention, this is just the beginning. We have a lot of good stuff in the product road map, and we’re adding new features and fixes on a weekly basis.
Thanks,
Lars
Founder/CEO
I think y’all are off to a great start, Lars. I’m looking forward to seeing what all we can do with our SecondBrain as you continue to develop.
Second:Brain brings in all of your tags. It only displays the 30 [or so] most frequently used, but the others are there. You can get to them by searching the tags.
And no one’s even mentioned that SecondBrain is giving away a MacBook Air among other great prizes to someone who opens up a new account with them. I thought it was a bit gratuitous to mention it in the post, but here we are.
Open your SecondBrain account and you might be the winner.
This sounds like it might be worth giving a shot. There is one thing I am not clear about, however. Does this service enable one to mass-submit from SecondBrain to a variety of social news sites?
@Pamela Egan: We don’t support that feature yet – but this something we have in our product roadmap.
This is a great idea! I know I am getting information overload and feel that it makes me less productive. I need a way to keep it all organized.
I’ve been using SecondBrain for some time now and I like it more every day. It’s easy to search through your own content and it’s really great for others to be able to keep an eye on you without having to visit 3 or 4 different sites.
Given that they plan to both add more services and a tool to post on multiple channels, I am sure they’ll become extremely popular. And yeah, they really have a cool name.
Thanks for the heads up about Second Brain.
You’re quickly becoming a invaluable resource.
Chris, I’d like to personally thank you for this exceptional review. You even managed to help me better understand SB, and I consider myself one of the early adopters.
Second Brain = Friend feed + better look + some extra-functionality
I wonder if aggregators like Second Brain and Friend Feed will make Twitter more viable for later adopters.
Hmmm…interesting site. I checked it out….their organizational features are really what I think sets them apart. Without that they’re just another social bookmarking aggregator like you said. Thanks for the heads up on this one, it may end up saving me quite a bit of time. (To be honest, probably time I shouldn’t be spending anyway, but we’ve all got our vices, right? Mine’s just social media sites. lol.)
Thanks for the information on SecondBrain, Chris. I actually went ahead and registered for an account in the site a couple of days ago, right after I read this post. I can certainly appreciate the advantages and service that it provides. However, when I tried importing my Dugg pages, I got an error return after a few minutes of waiting. I’ll try and set up my library today and see if I can figure out how this site works. Thanks, again.
I agree, all this social networking is getting a little overwhelming. This looks like a great tool. Thanks!
Thanks for this review. It’s given me some idea about how I can use Second|Brain. Just got introduced to it the other day and hadn’t really been back after adding my ‘stuff.’
Good review.
It is my first time to hear about SecondBrain and your explanation excites me especially when you made a follow-up comment that SecondBrain is giving away a MacBook Air.
Thanks for pointing that out! And I will use this service now
I haven’t used it yet, but as soon as I’m finished with this post I will.
In October I set up 75 social networking sites about my business and while it looks like there isn’t 75 sites on SecondBrain it sure would have come in handy!
I’ll post, after I set it up, with my comments, THANK YOU!!
I reallt like secondbrain and the sign up is really easy.
yet another useful too tool to check out, must give it a whirl