Phil, you raise an interesting point with ‘All In One’. And I think an interesting aspect is wether a candidate for this aims to add value to an existing ecology of services and databases or replace them altogether. Obviously I believe in the former and highly doubt services proposing the latter.

I’m not going to talk down Facebook because they’re really good at their core offering – namely providing social utilities relating to real life social activities. Which means I might put an occasional photo or video if I want to share it with a friend that attended the same party or whatever. But I’ll keep using Flickr for Photos and YouTube for Videos because their better at treating that content specifically.

But then, having all my stuff stored all over the place in services that suits that specific item best, I still miss functionality to support relations between all my content. Wether this is photos and links for a trip I’ve planned or a slideshow and videos for a school project, I have the need to access and work with content across services.

And I think this frustration and lack of overview is what’s sparking a lot of the emerging sites nowadays. The last five years has brought us services that’ll let you upload, share and post enormous amounts of UGC. The next breed of services are now bringing sense, value, organization, productivity, efficiency etc. to this vast amount of content. I mean I have more personal content than I myself can keep track of. And similar to how Yahoo added value in categorizing and providing search functionality in a jungle of websites in the 90’s, some of us are now working on making life easier (and by all means, more fun!) dealing with content from and in all the services we’re connected to.

I can’t promise we’ll be your no#1 ‘All In One’, but you can bet on us aiming for it. Thank you for including us in your list. We’re proud to be on it.

Johan
Product Manager

The main difference between Second Brain and the other guys is our content centric focus.

We are building a content aggregation platform where people can organize all their web content in personal libraries and share everything through the Second Brain public library.

We’re more focused on content management and discovery than maintaining social relations, though we are going to take advantage of connections between people in our upcoming recommendation features.

Thanks,
Lars
Founder/CEO

You seem to have left out FriendFeed, which I think actually may, against most odds, have a shot against Facebook. Facebook has the dramatic advantage of being close to mainstream, while FriendFeed remains nearly totally techie.

I think the battle could come down to filtration: which platform will do the best job at extracting the signals in the noise and presenting them in an easily-to-digest fashion? Like you astutely point out, Facebook is full of banal behavior, but it has the user base and the resources necessary to build a technology capable of doing just that.

The only reason FriendFeed is a contender in my mind because of its API. Developers can build their own interfaces and find clever ways to filter information. Facebook’s going to have to do this on its own, and there’s a chance that some maverick could come along and beat them to the punch.

Got more to add here, but must hop on a plane. I’m looking forward to seeing what Second Brain has under the hood.

Great post.

Second Brain was an is the most potentially “buildable” community out there. If Lars and Co. had not had back end problems, it would have already been the best of them all.

I need the XBox 360 for the kids as you said tho. :)

Always,

Phil