Second Brain – All Your Content

Looking for social content management

I was reading a few blogs and magazines recently, and there seems to be a certain social network fatigue around the web right now. People see that the web is social, and they are gaining experience with Facebook and MySpace. But they are starting to complain that these new social services are resembling the walled gardens of the 90’s, like for example AOL. People find it exhausting to keep all of their networks active and up to date, and Rolf Skyberg is envisioning a social client. 

Wired just gave a Slap in the Facebook, asking social services to open up.I studied the comments to the Wired article  and it seems people are divided into two camps: one enjoys the convenience of FB and finds the privacy protection sufficient, the other don’t appreciate the closed nature of the network and find the internet content management features lacking.

I think this is an interesting trend. Everyone believes in the social nature of the internet. It's built into its DNA on the level of hyperlinked web-pages in the open WWW environment. But adding people to the equation has generated several new "do-all--for-you" -style web portals.

Every content service on the web will have a social community component, YouTube has its own community, Delicious has a community, and the same is true for Flickr (and many other smaller niche services like skribd and slideshare). I don't believe there will be a single social service to cover everything from people relations, privacy and content creation and management. People who believe that are betting on the old portal strategy of the early days.

I believe that people will be members of different social networks and they will participate on various levels with certain types of contribution on a wide variety of services. Just consider the flickerish nature of the younger audiences. Ask your younger nephew how many internet sites he has used regularly the past month. Then ask him how many he has used the past year. Finally, think about this over let's say a five year period - and you will start to see that people will take part in a very much richer internet life than the walled gardens of a single social network.

Scott Gilbertson in Wired asked for a system to help people manage their participation and contributions on the internet - and open service where people are in charge of what goes in and out of what and where. He came a long way in proving that it is possible to build a big mash-up of exiting services and replication most of the features already provided by Facebook.

Second Brain is on this challenge. Our goal is to help our users manage all the  content they create online and their contacts in their personal internet library. No walled gardens, everything based on open APIs.

We will help you remix and share content from unrelated services on any webpage - heck we'll even help you move content between the services you're already using. So next time you sign up for something, and you want to publish some of your favorites on the site, you can just push it to the site via Second Brain. And over time, if you ever switch do a different social service, you can be sure that you can always access everything in Second Brain.

Everybody wants to become a platform

Inspired by R/WW's post on Yahoo and how they should open up their platform for 3rd party developers, I'd like to share a few of my own opinions on this trend.

After Facebook opened up their platform, it seems like the new holy grail of the internet is to become the next platform. After a few years with deportalization and widgetization as the trend, it seems like platformization is the new direction. Platforms do have an advantage over old school portals in that they may provide services and content from 3rd parties - not necessarily controlling and owing everything they users can access. But, I still think this just the modern day equivalent of the good old portal. We already have a platform, it is called the World Wide Web, and there are lots of nice protocols that enable us to create cooperating systems on the world's biggest desktop. We don't need to create new platform silos on top of the application silos that already exist.

The main reason I am not "all in" on Facebook, is that it is still a closed social network (even though everyone can join).  Developers can create applications that work on Facebook, but to me this is a bit analogous to Microsoft - everyone can develop applications that work on Windows and people who have Windows PCs can use the applications on Windows (i.e.Facebook).

I think there is a need to help people manage all the fragmented services that exist today. The growth of Facebook is proof of this. They have introduced many fun and social applications to people that never read TechCrunch. And they have provided several of their application providers with new users that would never have heard of them otherwise.

After the explosion in innovation for the collaborative web, there are so many new services around, each with their unique features and benefits. (OK, not all of them.) We should find a way of organizing them, but I don't think we should put them into new social silos. I believe more in the approach of Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle which basically work as open placeholders for other applications content and their basic features,  than in forcing an application to work within a closed social network on top it's own community.

Facebook will become a great platform for conspicuous internet applications and work very well as a social network. They've definitely staked out a very strong and attractive position in this market.

But as a platform for  the collaborative web - I think we should focus on interconnecting what already exist on the distributed desktop via open APIs and work towards greater cooperation between the services. We don't really need a Facebook or a Yahoo platform to do this - we just need to open up and work together, independently and synergistically on the World Wide Web.

Where will Second Brain be?

Read/WriteWeb has a great analysis of the major social networking sites. They estimate their traffic and present a chart comparing their features. The interesting aspect of this, from a Second Brain perspective, is to test our position of opportunity in this space. Sometimes, when we try to describe ourselves, we use the phrase "a social network for smart people". Second Brain is a place where people can create their own personal library of all thoughts and things. There are no social networking sites in the Read/WriteWeb list, or on the more general Wikipedia list, with this type of position statement. While it may be argued that all social networking sites work on the basis of sharing some type of knowledge, none of them are targeting specific high-level knowledge sharing.

Some of the sites listed have sociability as their primary feature - they are created as a social space. But there are also other services, like del.icio.us and flickr.com, that are created to deliver a certain functional benefit - like managing bookmarks or pictures online - as their primary purpose. That's what draws people to them in the first place. Then, on top of this, they create a social layer that compounds the effect of people's content by several multiples and fuels a community that can take advantage of this unique resource.

Second Brain is first an foremost a place where people can create a personal library of everything they know. That's our main attraction. But later, in the BETA version, we'll add social features that enable people to share, collaborate and take advantage of each other's knowledge. We are targeting people who (1) are serious about their knowledge, (2) want to create a personal library online, and (3) would like to increase their social status by sharing quality knowledge and content.