Google Preparing a Unified Social Network
Yes, it’s been clear for a while - the huge number of social networks is not helping us organize our digital lives - it’s just adding to the noise. There has been several attempts to unify data from various social networks in one place - Profilactic, iStalkr, correlate.us to name a few - but most of them focused mostly on merely gathering all the info in one place, and active interaction with the social networks was an afterthought.
SocialStream is a project created by the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and funded by none other than Google, which tries to really unify all the social networks in one place. This means that not only you will be able to gather bits and pieces of your digital life in one place; you’ll also be able to update your social networks directly from SocialStream. See the screencast below for an overview of the project in its current stage.
The application is not actually live yet, and there’s no word on when it will be launch. From what I can gather from the screencast, the idea is great, but the actual implementation seems a bit too complex for the average user.
[via Google Operating System]
July 9th, 2007 at 7:21 am
[…] Google Preparing a Unified Social Network […]
July 9th, 2007 at 11:35 am
[…] Google Preparing a Unified Social Network […]
July 12th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Hi,
Just like SocialStream, we, the people behind 8hands, also believe that all of your online social activities should be managed from a single entry point. But, with SocialStream you still need to keep your browser open, and repeatedly check for new updates.
Because 8hands is a desktop application, it’s advantage is that it is the only aggregator that gives you real time notifications even when you’re off-site, so you can focus on doing other stuff and be more productive. Most of the time, all you need is a brief summary of a social network event, just a glance on a “headline” to keep you in the know. The desktop experience is much more suitable for this kind of interaction. Other profile aggregators, and SocailStream is among them, still force the ritual of continuously visiting a web profile.
Right now, 8hands supports MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter & many of the available blog platforms. Also, we’ve started working on a mobile version of 8hands, on integration of notifications from various web mail services and of course, on integration of many more social networks.
Stay tuned,
Alon
The 8hands Mega-Team