SecondBrain Aggregates More Services Pursuing Its Plans of Building the Next Millennium Library
by
on August 08, 2008,
Today SecondBrain announces a number of new services added to its lifestream aggregator and expected funding. For those of you uninitiated, the Norwegian startup is a lifestream aggregator that not only aggregates content from supported services but also allows user to create tag-based collections of content based on topics of their choice.
Today’s announcement includes addition of a total of 10 new services, including FriendFeed, Facebook, Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, and Qik. My concern is that at least addition of FriendFeed may very well make SecondBrain streams too crowded: just imagine aggregated content from FriendFeed combined with the same content from other services at the very same place.
But since SecondBrain claims to strive to become “the world’s largest and most compelling user generated content library”, the focus here is not on aggregating for the sake of aggregating or lifestreaming - instead they emphasize users’ ability to organize the content and help other users discover it via publicly-available collections.
The company also announces that it expects the next series of funding and the fact that SecondBrain has reached 10,000 registered users. I believe this announcement has a lot to do with their recent giveaway of MacBook Air and some other prizes. But unfortunately as a careful observer of the contest, I definitely can’t say that I was particularly happy about the company’s approach to using cool prizes to lure people into using the service. I was familiar with the contest because two of my good friends participated and I was hugely disappointed about the company announcing rules first sounding like they merely wanted to increase loyalty of existing users by encouraging the best content created in large volumes but then right when the users were ready to receive their prizes deciding to change the rules by adding voting as a last step of the contest - apparently to get more new registrations. I know that the participants invited quite a number of people to help them get the votes needed and one thing I’m sure of is that the majority of those who registered to help their friends will never actually use SecondBrain and thus help the ambitious plans of building the next millennium library of content.
The decision to change the rules right in the process and encouraging registrations of new users who will never become real “active” users (and I’m sure the guys at SecondBrain understood it as well as anyone else does) seemed to be far from fair to me and this makes me doubtful about the marketing policy of the company.
But obviously creating the largest next-generation library takes a lot of internet users promoting the efforts and hopefully they will be able to encourage those new users by the quality of the product and aggregating the broadest range of services (the press release mentions that they actually plan to add new supported services and features on a weekly basis) instead of following the tricky path of enticing users with prizes.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Vamsi Kishore
Peet McKimmie 
Irel Johnson
Great post Lana!
Secondbrain is a wonderful platform, and as you say - adding a lot more services and features regularly. As you know I work with SB in a consulting capacity, and I wanted to add some transparency to the issue of the contest.
As you probably already know, the Mac contest was done in conjuncton with Mashable. Originally the intention was to have a team from Mashable and Secondbrain judge the contest based on certain criteria. This seemed well and good, and we were prepared for some issues as always happen when some win and some lose, of course.
Obviously, given that the contest was run with Mashable and in conjunction with announcements, we expected a certain traffic or user gain from this contest, but I assure you the reasons were more than two fold to reward the community and achieve some new users - no huge secret here.
Out of course many Secondbrain users did some fantastic work both asking friends to join (which was one of the winner criteria from the start) and also in building great collections. However, as the contest came closer to its conclusion it became quite apparent that any decision of a winner would in effect be based on a rather arbitrary set of variables to an extent.
This being said, We approached SB management and a discussion ensued as to how best to decide the winners without any hint of bias. The developers were highly in favor of using the basic method described in the FAQ’s. There really was never any hard and set method other than a selection committee of sorts any way. In effect WE convinced the team to use the method you saw enacted towards the end of the contest because users voting in such a way, essentially took the contest result ou t of the hands of anyone associated with SB.
In the end, the team agreed to take this out of our hands, so if there is any heat to be had in regard to the refined method of selection I guess it should fall on me or or PR firm. Please realize however that in essence the people who were ahead by any citeria at the time we made the decision to have a vote for the ultimate decision, were essentially in the same position after the vote. I am not exactly sure as I do not have the numbers in front of me, but this link goes to the blog post that illustrates who was where about this time (I know because I edited this I believe). http://blog.secondbrain.com/2008/06/secondbrainiacs-in-hot-pursuit/
So, there you have the story as far as the contest was concerned. My favorite did not win either, but in the end none of us at SB had anything to do with the outcome…it was in the hands of the community. I think this is as it should have been, and if I am wrong blame me, our PR company or the phase of the moon rather than the developers.
If the team had made the decision by committee, I expect everyone who came in anywhere but 1st would have been just as disappointed and in this scenario - a committee would have been blamed. You see the dilemma I know Lana. In hindsight it is obvious that the process could have been handled a little better from the start, and we all learned a great deal in this effort.
I hope this explains the process and intention a little more clearly Lana, and I hope the people who worked so hard on the contest who are your friends will understand that all of this was done in an effort, a very real one, to be exceptionally fair.
Any way, I want to congratulate all the people who participated and won some cool stuff. I know of one person who, in my opinion, is especially deserving of winning much more than an electronic device. I believe she is donating her prize to some really deserving kids and I will personally be writing a story about her kindness. We cannot always choose who we want to prevail, but in the end, if we are kind and try really hard then we are all winners.
Thanks,
Phil Butler
Phil, thank you for the comment and for explaining the insights of the contest. In fact, I guess you misunderstood the reason of my grumbling here because actually both of my friends who participated one - they were on the 1st and 2nd place and I had a chance to congratulate both of them on the results. What I think was a wrong is decision is changing the rules and failing to communicate the change properly to the participants who were already waiting for their prizes to be announced. I don’t think it’s wise because all those people who expressed all the enthusiasm they could to create the best content in their collections based on the initial rules were ready to accept the decision made based on those initial rules. What they did not expect was the voting and having to go in another direction. And believe me, I have received quite a number of requests to vote (and sent some out myself) and I don’t think such users who were requested will ever actually use SB - no matter how wonderful the platform it is.
So again, I am not unhappy because someone I did not support won - I am unhappy because I think such public contests should have their rules established in the beginning and maintained.