In my everlasting quest to find the ultimate lifestreaming service to combine the data from all the shit I use online, I today stumbled upon SecondBrain.com (“stumble upon” meaning “read on TechCrunch“, really).
Unlike other services like FriendFeed, Tumblr, Profilactic, and a myriad of others, SecondBrain actually doesn’t just want your lifestream, it wants your stuff. Yes, that’s right. Plugging into the APIs of the services you want them to track, they’ll import everything into your SecondBrain account.
Now there are good and bad sides to that. The good one? It’s really a library of sorts, aggregating and making searchable the content you have created online. This is clearly a lot better than what most other lifestreaming services do, especially since SecondBrain imports all of the metadata associated with your content too. Thus, you get a real tagcloud of the stuff you do online.
Now, here’s what’s bad: Needing the service to access an API makes it a lot less flexible. Right now they’re supporting 11 services, which is good for a start, but simply not enough when you want to give people the ability to aggregate all their user generated content. Adding RSS feeds is not possible, so you are stuck with the services SecondBrain offers.
SecondBrain also lets you import your documents from Zoho and GoogleDocs, switching the status of the documents to private automatically. This is what I expected, but I also expected them to not show people that I’m actually synching my GoogleDocs (which SecondBrain does, as it displays publicly what services the lifestream’s owner is using).
Apart from that library focus, SecondBrain gives users the option to add content to SecondBrain directly or to comment on another user’s items. Of course you can decide to follow other users’ lifestreams as well.
Overall SecondBrain is a good service, even though the lacking support for RSS feeds is making it a lot less flexible than many of its competitors.