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Plaxo Pulse and social network aggregators

Is anyone else tired of the email carpet bombing from Plaxo? The latest rage is Pulse, a new social network service. My email inbox started getting bombed with invitations last night. Here is how Plaxo describes it...

What's pulse?

Pulse is a new sharing service from Plaxo. Pulse is the easiest way to share photos, recommendations, links, videos, bookmarks, comments - or just about anything - with your friends, family, or business network. Have you checked your Pulse?

 

Hmm...I already have Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, and even the regular Plaxo for contacts. Is Pulse for the neophytes that don't already use one of the many existing social networks?

Social Network Aggregators - For all of you at the other end of the spectrum, the ones that have joined just about every social network, there are now Social Network Aggregators. These services combine all your social network content in one place so you, and others, can view your blog posts, comments, pictures, Twitters, Facebook entries, etc. Many of these services also allow you to "enter once" and post everywhere, saving you the trouble of posting the same content to multiple social sites. Here are some of the services you might want to check out.

 

FriendFeed - FriendFeed is the latest creation from four former Google guys, including Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail. Here is the description from Friend Feed. With FriendFeed, you list the people you want to keep in touch with. They let us know what services they use (e.g., Flickr or Facebook or Picasa Web Albums), and you get a personalized feed of what they are up to. So, if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. You don't need to install anything to use FriendFeed — our crawling technology automatically picks up all the stuff you do on the web sites you already use with no additional effort on your part.

Spokeo - Steve O'Hear at ZDnet reviewed Spokeo and described it as "a social network aggregator which presents each user with an updated view of all of their friends' activities on sites such as MySpace, Digg, Flickr and YouTube. In fact Spokeo has support for over 20 of the most popular social networks, as well any site that provides an RSS feed."

 

ProfileLinker - Mike Arrington at TechCrunch reviewed ProfileLinker and says "You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks."

 

Soup.io - Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch did a review of Soup.io. TechCrunch describes it this way "Without needing to sign up, you can easily combine feeds from services like: Flickr, Digg, LiveJournal, Delicious, eBay, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vox, YouTube, Zoomr, or any other RSS feed. Soup.io also has a bookmarklet that lets users easily add content to their feed from around the web, turning it into kind of a tumble blog"

Here is a list of 30 more from TheFattyTalks blog. It is just a list with links..no descriptions, but it does give you a feel for how many of these things are out there.

Published Thursday, November 01, 2007 11:36 AM by Don Dodge

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Venky Ganesan said:

First of all I am a board member at Plaxo so I am neither an uninterested party nor am I not biased.  

The fact is that in the last few days Pulse has taken off in a way that has totally surprised us insiders also. The organic uptake rate has been phenomenal.  Pulse is trying to do something different relative to the other social networks - its trying to bring all the activities of the people you know to you.  Plaxo has always been about "sync and share".  I want to sync with people's contact information and I want to share my activity on the Internet with people I know.  That's how we think about our differentiation.  

I am sorry Don that you feel carpet bombed with email notifications - we have one of the best "opt out" policies I know and while I would urge you to spend a little more time on the site to learn more about us, I would totally understand if you decide to opt out.

Venky

November 2, 2007 2:12 PM
 

Don Dodge said:

Venky,

I am a happy Plaxo user. I was just surprised by the deluge of email requests when Pulse launched. The uptake must be wide and fast.

Maybe I am a little jaded by all the Web 2.0 social network startups springing up everywhere.

BTW, I do think Plaxo is one of the natural places to have a social network since that is where your real contacts already exist. The same could be said for Outlook Contacts. It wouldn't take too much effort to add social network capabilities to Outlook Contacts.

I will take another look at Pulse. Thanks for the comment.

Don

November 2, 2007 3:34 PM

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About Don Dodge

I have been in the software business for more than 20 years. I started my software career with Digital Equipment Corp, aka DEC, in the database group. I worked with 5 software start-ups over the next 12 years. Forte Software was the first multiplatform object oriented development environment. AltaVista was the first search engine on the web. Napster was the first P2P file sharing network. Bowstreet was the first web services development environment. Groove Networks was the first secure P2P collaboration platform. Now I am at Microsoft...the biggest start-up in the world... working with VC's and start-ups in the greater Boston area. The goal is to help VC's and start-ups be successful with Microsoft, and together, provide great products for our customers.
Don Dodge
Information Worker Productivity
I have been in the software business for more than 20 years. I started my software career with Digital Equipment Corp, aka DEC, in the database group. I worked with 5 software start-ups over the next 12 years. Forte Software was the first multiplatform object oriented development environment. AltaVista was the first sear...

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