SecondBrain: CMS for the ordinary

By Vivek | April 30th, 2007 at 10:23 pm ET         

How much so ever Google, Yahoo, Microsoft try, and and how much so ever you want, there will always be a mix of services and applications that you would eventually use from each of them. If you are not using apps from one of these biggies, you would definitely be using services from smart startups like Editgrid or Peepel or …..Eitherway you will have your documents and files located around the web, with no possible way to access them easily. OpenId solves some problems, but only if you want to login to those sites. What if you just want to manage your online content from one place? More so like your digital media center where all your digital content stays put.

Well, SecondBrain is working since last year to tackle just this issue that will make your media management lot easier. SecondBrain(S|B), which is in private beta as of now, is taking the concept of content management system and applying it to all the online apps and social media sites we use. S|B is working on set of services that can access your online information from likes of Flickr, Youtube, del.icio.us, GoogleD&S, Picasa, and Bluedot with more services under works. In other words lot of work against APIs of external services to get your content into one place. And if you need to add more stuff to your library from your PC, S|B always has the regular upload option. Once you have all your stuff up there, you can arrange them neatly in your Library, create collections, and eventually share them with your friends online.

In some ways S|B feels like Koral or maybe Egnyte or maybe eSnips or maybe BlogBackupOnline. Nevertheless a good mix of features.

My concern is that as the service launches and grows and so does the amount of documents and files stored by each user, performance of the service would eventually depend on the search capabilities. Being able to search for spoken words in Videos and Podcasts, keywords in EditGrid spreadsheet, keywords in Microsoft Office docs, tags in your del.icio.us bookmarks….. and more situations like these would bring out the real utility of the service. Being able to build one such comprehensive search engine would be a massive undertaking in itself.

Besides the search side of things, being able to preview documents online would be definitely required. This is another integration nightmare especially when you have numerous services delving the same solution. Koral did ppt previews before getting snapped by Salesforce, while we have the big CMS mashup coming early in May that utilizes all Office20 apps at once. Not sure how far down S|B would like to go on this.

On the whole, if looking at entirety of all these features, S|B definitely has lot of work in store. Not easy to get done with, still worth watching how they go about solving each/any of the real-real problems.

Links:
SecondBrain