The social bookmarking frenzy goes on. For quite a while I’ve been waiting for a redesign of del.icio.us, something that would really make me want to use it at its full potential. But that did not happen and I’ve continued to gather bookmarks the classic way, in my browser and through StumbleUpon or FriendFeed. Still it requires a lot of time to sort everything out while searching for something you’ve discovered 3 months ago. That until the day I got my SecondBrain!
I know, it sounds crazy, but that’s what SecondBrain is for. A place where you can collect your links, organize them through tags and collections and share them with other users. The good part is that you can import all your bookmarks from most of your favorite social bookmarking and social networking services available at this moment and track them all from one place.
If we take a look at how the folks at SecondBrain describe their services we won’t see anything revolutionary
- Import content from all your favorite services in one place
- Browse and search all your content
- Organize content into collections
- Keep track of your content in a single library
- Share your lifestream
- Find people through content, and content through people
but the difference is made when you start using the site.
Signing up takes only a few seconds and after that you’ll step in a good looking, friendly environment, one that somehow reminds me of MySpace’s layout, from a structural point of view.
There are a few things that I don’t quite like, especially the fact that on the dashboard I see additions from friends of friends, and I have no visible option to turn that off. Perhaps I need ta take a closer look at the preferences, but still, that kind of option should be pretty much obvious. At least you have the option to display only your own updates.
Considering the website’s design, I find that a few icons are too big for this kind of service. I need to focus more on the content than having a page filled by only four or five icons.
Where there’s potential, there are also premises for evolution
SecondBrain is getting ready for a BETA 2 stage, and that’s why I’m sure that most problems will be solved and I’m also guessing that if you sign up with them, your feedback will be greatly appreciated. Further more, there’s also a contest for those who sign up in this period and a chance to win a MacBook Air.
One policy that SecondBrain has is that the added content will be manually reviewed by their team (in the background of course, as you don’t need to panic about not getting approved) and the most valuable additions will also be rewarded.
So, there you go, more reasons to try it out. I did, and I’m happy with it, at least for the fact that it’s still a BETA, and where there’s potential, there are also premises for evolution.
The day I got my SecondBrain was the day my browsing history became more accessible.
