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”).

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).

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

A New Secondbrain: Simplified, Clean, Easier to Use

There are a few reasons behind my seldom apparitions on the Web – some of personal nature (relocating home and office to larger premises) and some professional. While the personal reasons allow for some flexibility in scheduling tasks, the professional activities know no “excuses.” I must admit it is quite tiring to manage work and private life, and sometimes it is difficult to “think” when the schedule is crowded with so many tasks. So consider this a cry for help.

I need your feedback to help me with a project I am working on right now for Pamil Visions’ newest customer Fairtilizer. I already managed to finish an extensive competitor analysis and sure market analysis and the next task is “user and visitor feedback” to determine what changes need to be applied for the landing page (screenshot below) to become more effective. Under normal circumstances this would be a time-consuming task requiring research, web-based surveying and data analysis. At this stage such an in-depth endeavor would be more than the client needs – the homepage will be redesigned anyway. But your feedback will still help giving the design company an idea of what to improve or change. It will also help Fairtilizer better understand what their visitors think when they first see their current version of the site.

So if you have some time, please take a look at the screenshot below, and then answer as many of the following questions as you can. In exchange… you know you can count on my help at any time you need it.

1. What do you like about the design at fairtilizer.com?
2. What do you most dislike?
3. How would the site be more effective?
4. What do you think of when you first see the Fairtilizer logo?
5. What does the name Fairtilizer bring to mind?
   • A county fair
   • Cow manure
   • A rich alluvial plain
   • Other
6. How would the header be more effective?
7. What three things do you expect from your online music destination?
8. Which is more important: the artist on the music site or the community/ networking aspect?
9. Would you rather visit or use an online radio station or are building playlists and music news more important?
10. Do you think the online music industry needs a change? What kind of change?

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Feedback Needed – The Best Music Site Is the Goal

Lately everyone who is anyone in social media paid tremendous attention to a little Norwegian startup that goes by the name of “Secondbrain.” There were reasons for people to talk about this new social aggregation platform, some of them including the MacBook Air contest that pre-announced the launch of the Beta 2.0

I already covered Secondbrain and its features in a previous post so right now I would like to focus on the latest news.

Apparently the approach of the official Beta 2.0 launch – June 12 – made some waves in the blogosphere. Today Secondbrain added more than 800 new users and the signups continue to flow as I type these lines. With the flux of new users the already existent Secondbrainiacs have all the reasons to “fear” competition in the quest to win the MacBook Air. There are still a few days till the launch – date when the contest will be over. One week later Secondbrain will announce the winners. On a personal note… it is still pretty unclear how these will be selected. There are however entries on the Secondbrain blog Second Thoughts that offer some answers.

Contest or no contest, Secondbrain managed to receive plenty of favorable reviews in the past month – and this is encouraging for the developers. If you remember, Secondbrain started in March 2005, but some technical difficulties broke the rhythm and allowed it for Profilactic and FriendFeed to grow, despite their inferior features.

To make a long story short, if you are still in doubt about joining Secondbrain, here are some reviews you’ll find useful to make up your mind.

• Organize Your Internet with Secondbrain
• Secondbrain – The First Complete Social Aggregator
• Secondbrain – Worthy Competitor in the Aggregation Market
• Secondbrain – Aggregate Your Content Libraries the Easy Way
• Boot Up Your Secondbrain
• Secondbrain Rewards Great Content
• Secondbrain – Social Content Bookmarking and Networking
• Do You Need a Secondbrain for the Internet
• Writers’s Café – Do You Need a Secondbrain? And Win a MacBook Air
• Secondbrain Aids Your Gray Matter
• We Need a Secondbrain
• A New Social Bookmark Service Secondbrain
• Twitter Is Over Capacity

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Secondbrain: The Final Countdown

I just got off my instant messenger with Khris Loux, CEO of JS-Kit. We chatted about this post and in essence a new way of providing a transparency to beneath his startup. JS-Kit just announced via TechCrunch, a widget that essentially traverses the Web – with its users – carrying a degree of credibility and potential unheard of before. Advisor, as it is called, is truly the next generation in Web carry on luggage.

Over the last several months Khris, his team and to a lesser extent Pamil Visions PR have evangelized Khris’ vision of partnership and collaboration. Khris and his development team are providing people with seemingly small innovations (widgets in some cases) with tremendous potential and reach. I like to call these types of innovations “3 Deep Objects” or objects that carry far richer data than what we have experienced in the past.

Developing Relationships

With deals like the Experian partnership and the ensuing JD Power one JS-Kit is embarking on ventures that can and probably will alter the face of the Web. Bringing physical world (or traditional) companies into interaction with digital tools and companies is at the leading edge of what true Web value is all about. The things that do not connect th two realms will be simply categorized as entertainment rather than real Web applications.

It is interesting that the simplest tools might provide the framework for connectivity such as this. But then, visions like that of Khris Loux are often the catalyst for much farther reaching innovation. I am sure because of my inside view into many of these dealings, that we will soon see theses ideas applied atop what will be Web 3.0. The advent of a more semantic Web and super refined content/data is virtually at hand – the good news is people are finally seeing these possibilities, as illustrated in some of Khris’ partnerships of late. Solid relationships between Khris, his vast network , credible and progressive companies and for our part everyone on his team are all aimed at one target – next generation engagement.

Inside A Vision

Beneath the outward Web expression of the website, deals and developments are forged every day. I was never privy to these goings on as a writer for several Web 2.0 blogs except as an interloper via my testing a reviews of many startups. Working with many of them since crossing over into PR and consulting, we have become acutely aware that Web 2.0 was and is in fact what many of us predicted it would be all along – a vast and dynamic web of collaborative efforts at expansion and improvement. However, even I could not have predicted that smaller companies like JS-Kit might begin to lead the way in these efforts.

Over the past few months we have approached dozens of startups, blogs, websites and more significantly traditional businesses in an effort to foster not only Khris Loux’s vision, but that of numerous CEO’s and developers who we believed shared the same vision. The galvanizing stimulus for this “dispersion” however, has been JS-Kit’s efforts in partnering with Experian, JD Power and many other more traditional expertises. The Experian widget is the culmination of one stage of Loux’s plans for versions of this “3 Deep” tool, but it was not exactly an easy sell. It is difficult to express how a simple widget can convey user data, Experian credibility and an extremely viral branding element.

Never Concluding

It is not possible to disclose more about JS-Kit’s evangelism efforts other than to say the TC story is fairly the tip of the iceberg. JS-Kit’s widgets will soon be utilized by over 20 million unique users via the announced and unannounced partnerships. The entirety of these great collaborative and business partnerships reaches far afield from this however. The people we approached in the online aspect of this evangelism so far would make a decent “who’s who” of Web 2.0. As for the traditional corporate aspect, the same holds true.

In the end, it is apparent at this point that Khris’ widgets will soon be integrated in not only blogs but search, video, social media, bookmarking, directories, social communities and a host of other online applications. The most exciting aspect of all this besides being associated with great people is that there is literally no end in sight. One vision, some simple but effective tools and a lot of cooperation equals Web 3.0 – Bravo TechCrunch for carrying the story and especially to Khris and his team – of which we are proud to be a member.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Echoes of Web 3.0 – JS-Kit’s Advisor Widget