Second Thoughts

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.