14 DAY TRIAL // Secondbrain, a social media tool that merges online bookmarking and sharing with other social networking features, is getting a reboot and a makeover. After even its creators admitted that the system was far from perfect they are ready to give it another try.
“Online bookmarking should be easy, and we were not happy with how we solved the core user scenarios in Secondbrain,” wrote the Secondbrain team on their blog. ”But our previous solution concept tried to do much more than that, e.g. lifestreaming, online file management, synchronizing all social media account etc. This became an unmanageable complexity for our design and development team – but most importantly – compromised the user experience for our core use case.”
The new service will be much more focused on just the basics, bookmarking interesting content and easily sharing that content with others, not trying to be all things to all people. The move should make it easier to attract new users and maybe regain some who left but it might also be disliked by some of the current users as the changes will affect their content. Now only the manually imported content is still available; pictures, video or other content imported from other services are all gone.
Another feature that didn't make the cut is the synchronization with Delicious bookmarks, which can only be added manually for now. And finally, the biggest social networking trait, the possibility to follow other user's content, is now gone as the site isn't trying to compete with full featured social networking sites like Facebook or FriendFeed. There is however the option to follow “collections,” which is content from a variety of sources, like blogs, videos, photos, all related to a certain topic.
The changes make for a much more streamlined experience but that doesn't guarantee success for the service as it may very well be that users may not find that many uses for it when there are much more popular alternatives to sharing content, like Twitter and even Facebook.