For a little while now, I’ve been testing a service called Second Brain.
Second Brain is a life stream service with a twist. I know, I know – life stream services are a dime a dozen, and if you asked me if it were a good idea to start developing a new one, I’d probably say no, BUT, Second Brain has two clear advantages, compared to other services like it:
- It syncs your content!
Why is this a good thing? well, obviously, it’s good to know that changes made to my back log of content are also implemented in Second Brain. - You can create collections
This is where it gets really hot, if you ask me. You can choose across your different types of content and create collections to share with anyone and everyone (or a few chosen ones, if that’s your pleasure). One example might be a list of potential baby names (Google doc), pictures of said baby (Flickr), videos (YouTube) and links to statistics on popular names (del.icio.us) – all neatly put together in a collection. Now, this is just one example, but the potential is huge. Think in terms of putting together study material, sources, brain storms etc.
Now there are still a bunch of stuff that could be done to improve Second Brain, but off the top of my head there are only a few things I’d focus on:
- Add more supported services – all the time! (personally I’m really hoping for Vimeo support)
- Focus more on collections – it’s what sets Second Brain apart from the rest. So leave status updates and the rest of that stuff to all the others (hell, even LinkedIn asks me what I’m doing now, and as of recently I nearly only use hellotxt to update statuses across the board of services) and emphasize the coolness of the user as the curator for his own stuff.
But keep an eye out for Second Brain – it’s bound to catch on!
You can read more about Second Brain on their blog with the very appropriate name Second Thoughts
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3 Comments
First of all, thanks for investing your time in Second Brain, Asbjørn. I was hoping would like it. And you’re really spot on where other bloggers missed (Techcrunch being one of them), Second Brain is about content. Sure we do lifestreaming but that’s just a feature that comes natural for our core mission – to create a great manager for your personal online content. You’ll see a lot of services these days advertising that they’re ‘all your content in one place’. But when only connecting by RSS they’re really more just ‘some of your stuff at a certain point in time’. We aim to primarily use API so that we can synchronize all your stuff, treat them as actual items you can take action on (such as universal tags, collections etc) and (around the corner) two-way editing.
We really appreciate your thoughts and suggestions, don’t hesitate to let us know if you can think of more good stuff. And I’ll see what we can do on Vimeo, which also happens to be one of my favorites. Actually we’re giving away moo-cards for the best ideas these days on our blog.
Thanks again, man….
Thanks for the review Asbjørn. As Johan writes, you’re spot on with your description and your suggestions for improvements/differentiators. I’ve been reading user feedback the past few days, and the people how understand the concept of organizing in collections, are the ones who like S|B the most. In the next few iterations we will only focus on adding more services as well as improving the user flow of working with collections.
Thanks,
Lars
Founder/CEO
Well, thanx for providing a kick ass service, guys – and I’m sorry I’ve posted suggestion in your feedback form as well as here. Didn’t mean to spam ya
I’m really getting into Second Brain, and just so you know, I’ll be doing a post (In Danish) on the Wemind blog as well.