Secondbrain announced today – via newsletter – that the site has gone through some major changes. I suspected that the team was “cooking” something, but I never expected to see Secondbrain simplifying so much and canceling so many features I used to like before.

My personal preferences however are irrelevant in this situation. Secondbrain made a decision that will probably appeal more to its customers, although I can anticipate some voices against this more (particularly from those who used Secondbrain as what it was initially advocated: the place to store “all your content”).

A new Secondbrain

Secondbrain is rebuilding and reinventing itself, on a base of over 11,500 users. The service will offer only online bookmarking from now on. In the future probably Secondbrain will support social media service and file uploading again, but these are gone for now and so are all imported items (picture, video, messages, bookmarks, etc) from other social media services. What stayed with Secondbrain are items manually placed in collections.

Delicious bookmarks imports are no longer available either – there is however an option to export data manually from delicious and then import the file to Secondbrain.

As for the “social networking” aspect, there is no longer an option to follow people – Secondbrain would rather have you follow “topics” or “collections” instead. This means, from a user perspective, more control over the updates received. I wouldn’t call this a smart move though: every social network I ever joined had as motivation meeting people with similar interests. As for updates, topics, collections and news, I can always use other services, like Google News. This being said, I like the new interface: it looks cleaner and more user friendly. What I don’t like is the impossibility to communicate with other users, the impossibility to create a community (which was always one of Secondbrain’s weaknesses).


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