8hands - Social Aggregator on your Desktop
By Vivek | April 18th, 2007 at 10:37 pm ET
After spending hours blogging everyday, last thing I want to do is load my profile page on all the numerous social networks I am part of to check what is new. While there have been quite a few attempts at solving this issue via web tools like Profilactic, Iceflake, Ziki, FindMeOn, but not a whole lot of them plan to deliver something right on your desktop. Well 8hands is there to help in case you are looking for a desktop based solution that bring latest updates from your social profiles. Currently 8hands aggregates your profiles from MySpace, Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, and also sources RSS feeds, which should be more than enough to satisfy most of the people.
To start with, you need to understand that 8hands doesn’t try to replicate the social networking sites on your desktop. Instead it’s IM client like UI pulls up the list of 8 most active users in the IM window with whom you interacted within the last 4 weeks. So in effect, what you get is a very dynamic list based on the activity metric and not just a static good and great friend list. 8hands notifies you upon receiving any comment, message, friend request, new video or any other event on your and your friends profiles from any of the networks you are part of. And than comes the interesting piece. If one of the person on your list is also a 8hands member, you can start an IM chat with him/her. So you can be talking to your friends from MySpace and Youtube all at the same time without pulling up Skype or Google Talk and maintaining yet another contact list. Besides these features, 8hands also has an Media angle to it where it brings in all your and your friends media content including photos, videos and feeds.
On the whole a pretty interesting tool. Would like them to aggregate content from other social biggies like Bebo, Facebook, and Orkut, while also showing the scraps and pokes.
Links:
8hands
on April 19th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Yeah it’s cool, I’m using it right now
on April 19th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Hi Vivek,
Thanks for spotting us and writing such a nice review while we’re still only in public alpha
Just wanted to add clarify a few things:
1. It may not have been clear from your review, but we do also have
a “static good and great friend list”, it can be found on the
“favorites” tab, next to the top 8. Any friend who is spotted on your
8hands to be an 8hands user, can be added to your list of
favorites to be cherished forever and easily accessed.
2. One of our cool features is our combination of IM Media. You
can enhance your communication with friends by dragging media
from our Media Zone and dropping it on an IM conversation. Since
all the media we present is online, the media item is instantly
shown to the other person. It’s like an interactive, live tumblelog!
3. Each social site we track is a plug-in, so we can add more and
more of them, without forcing the user to update the software
just to have to more content included.
Once again, thanks for the kind words. We’ll be releasing another release in a few days and we plan on adding more social content, both from biggies and smallies as fast as we can code them.
Cheers,
Ofer
P.S.
You can contact me on 8hands -
From the 8hands app click Options -> Add/Invite and enter “oferp@8hands.com”.
on April 19th, 2007 at 6:28 am
wow! great app! me & some myspace friends started to im on it - it’s so nice… still got some alpha problems - of course… can’t wait for the first stable release…
on April 19th, 2007 at 6:46 am
Thanks for the info.
sounds interesing
on April 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am
[…] Startupsqoud gave us a very good feedback on the product we have all been working on for about a year, and which we just launched this week. I must admit that when I first saw the mail from Maya, 8hands‘ content manager, carrying the title “8hands in the media“, I thought it was a bad one… Otherwise, she would have given the mail a more happy title. But then I opened and read it – and it’s great. […]
on April 30th, 2007 at 2:33 am
[…] 8hands (review) […]
on June 3rd, 2007 at 2:34 am
i’m stick with profilefly.com for this area, its simple and does what i need it to do
on July 22nd, 2007 at 12:55 am
[…] 8hands is a desktop app, so I didn’t try it out, but it seems to be both a lifestream and a way to connect to your friends from various social networks, if they are also 8apps users you can IM chat. I think the idea is more about connection, as you can check who has commented or left a message from all your online profiles from the one spot…now that’s handy. Minggl seems similar to 8apps. […]
on July 25th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
[…] ProfileLinker I believe has some of these features, and what about 8hands and minggl…can anyone fill me in on whether any of these services allow you to receive comments/messages from all your profiles in one spot, and send comments/messages from the one spot? […]