Would my project be useful to you?

yeah I would like it and I think others would. Would it auto update when you updated the sites that it fed from. That would be cool.

Of course :)

I don’t know of any sites that do that and I think its a great idea! I’m not sure if I’d use it personally but I could see it being quite useful for some. Good luck with it.

can’t you do most of this with iGoogle? using gadgets for iGoogle or using RSS feeds from those sites?

I don’t think this is exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s in the same ballpark—Digsby

Sweet…..can I be in the test group?

here’s a screenshot of iGoogle with the feeds you described.

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc46/thecatron/igoogle-1.jpg

I haven’t used Digg in months, but the feed I have on the left side shows last articles you commented on. The other Digg feed on the right side just shows the most recent articles to hit Digg.

The Twitter viewer shows your “tweets” and the people who you are following. The Fluther RSS feed shows the most recent questions…although it was a little behind when I took the screenshot. The Flickr feed can show the recent photos from any user that has public pictures.

I’m not trying to rain on your parade….Just showing you that you don’t have to “re-invent the wheel”! Anything you can get RSS feeds for can be displayed on http://iGoogle.com

edit: the Digg Comment reader is faulty because you have to enter a name of a user to view their comments each time you view the igoogle page.

Sounds like http://FriendFeed.com

Yeah, I use FriendFeed to collect all my accounts into one location.

Bearing in mind, a first mover advantage isn’t the only advantage. If you can make something faster, more streamlined and more intuitive than iGoogle and Friend Feed, you stand a good chance.

Sounds like friendfeed.

Could really take off though, good luck!

@kevbo – is Digsby a desktop application? If so, it’s not in my park at all :)

@ccatron – I don’t use iGoogle, but is your iGoogle page public? If so, I guess it’s similar.

FriendFeed looks similar, just like Plaxo Pulse and Mugshot.

I’m looking to differentiate on openness, however. As opposed to FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse, my project is open source and can be installed yourself, at your own domain if you wish. This makes it a more personal website, allows you to theme it to your likings and install modules to support the services you prefer instead of waiting for the website to add support.

Do you guys think that’s differentiating enough? I know a lot of people don’t really care about the openness, like my brother, but I know he did greatly enjoy customizing his Wordpress installation. I really need a second opinion on this… :)

Oh, and as richardhenry says: the streamlined aspect is important to me too, as I’ve spent a lot of time into writing good code and I know it’s solid, so it’s easy to extend and will work pretty well.

Just make it really easy to do. For example, have an option to add sites in a batch, if you use the same username… just check the sites you want to add, with a big text field for the name that you use. Step two can be the remaining services that you don’t use the same username on. You get the idea.

Your project could parse the list of friends or contacts you have on the sites that are added, and then look them up on your project, automatically allowing you to follow them and find out what sites they use. That would be useful.

I had a really similar idea a few months ago and after talking to programmers and surveying the current state of the web, I decided to change course.

I do think the idea is good, but there are other social aggregaters out there that haven’t caught on so I think the key elements you should focus on are the things that make sites great- simplicity, ease of use, and design. You nail those elements, and your site will definitely develop a core user base.

Check out http://www.Mint.com they do what you’re trying to do, but with financial info, and they do it well.

I would totally go for that. And personal opinion is friendfeed is ugly and plain. Make it cool looking and easy to use and I’m in.

@vincentt – you should check out igoogle. anybody can set up an account and there are a ton of what they call “gadgets” to use on your personal igoogle page.

@richardhenry – hmm, how do you see that? I.e. say I use the same username at Flickr, Digg, Twitter and whatnot, should I just add them all to a single page? I like the idea though, I’m going to breed on that for a bit :)

@jballou – so what if I market the “personal website” more strongly? The reason I don’t currently use a social aggregator but will use this is because I want a website “of my own”, and you don’t get that feeling with, say, FriendFeed.

@ccatron – I’ve checked it out in the past, but didn’t really like it as I got the impression that it was more like something to set as your homepage in your browser (and I already have that). Can you use iGoogle for a personal website to show others?

It sounds like a great idea but it seems like it has already been done. Soup.io does a pretty good job of combining all your online personas. But dont let that stop you. Social networking websites have been around for over 10 years now and yet facebook has gotten so popular because they simply perfected it.

@mirza – that looks nice. Do you also use that as a personal website? And I suppose it doesn’t let you host it yourself, does it?

@vincentt – not that I know of…but I wouldn’t necessarily want other people to view my personal feeds. they can look at their own. I guess I’m not sure what you’re trying to do.

@ccatron – good, let me try to explain it clearly because obviously I won’t extract users if I can’t explain the idea :).

Basically, the target audience is “people who want to create a personal website but already have a lot of information about themselves online”. For example, I’ve been posting a lot of my images on 23, I’ve got various blogs and have the music I listen to aggregated on Last.fm.

Now, I want a website to represent me. However, instead of creating yet another online profile, I just combine everything I already have online.

So I’d set up my software (which shouldn’t be too difficult) and start adding “blocks”. So I’d first add an image stream that posts the, say, five latest pictures I’ve uploaded to 23 (this could also be e.g. Flickr). Then I add another block that can read RSS feeds. I use that to display the, say, ten latest blog posts from all the blogs I have. Then I could add a Last.fm block which displays my favourite tracks this week in the footer. And there you have it: a personal website just for me :)

If anything’s not clear yet, please ask as refining my explanation is very valuable.

@Mirza – I’m playing around with soup.io right now and it looks very cool :)

@vincentt: nope. I dont really have a personal website – I just use facebook for personal use. I simply use soup.io to combine the popular web services I use. It doesnt let you host it yourself and i sort of like that since its so much easier but it does let you use your own domain name.

But if you really want to make a popular personal site, try tumblr. Its mainly a micro-publishining service, but you can add any feeds to it like flickr, last.fm,digg,etc.

@vincentt – ok, that makes more sense now, thanks. igoogle doesn’t do this. it’s only viewable by the user who logs into igoogle.

@mirza – so what do you do with the combined popular webservices? Tumblr has a limit of just importing five feeds and, like every other similar service I know of right now, has the limitation of depending on the website to support the sites you like to use.

Anyway, thanks everybody who has answered up til now, every single contribution has been very valuable.

to answer the initial question, yes i could see myself trying your site.

@vincent: to be completely honest, I have no idea. Its just there just because I like the whole idea behind it. I mostly just use my tumblelog to spread whatever I want and since it has a decent amount of subscribers it seems perfect.

Sounds awesome Vincentt i would love something like this. Look forward to using it when you get it out. ^_^

I just want to say how fricken cool every respondant is on this post. Very supportive, informative and encouraging. That rocks!
I don’t actually use the services that your project combine but I sure would ask to be included if I did. Best of luck bud!

@mirza – OK, thanks :)

@Bri_L – exactly! I’ve never seen such good answers, even on Fluther :)

Anyway, those services I mentioned were just examples. Which services are you using? Of course I want to support as many services as possible :)

You might want to check out Multiply

Thanks breanne, but that looks more like an all-in-one service, i.e. a replacement for all the blogging-, photo-sharing-, video-sharing-, etc.-websites, isn’t it?

Sounds good, I’d probably use it. What language will you develop it in, I presume you will be using numerous API’s available out there. I’m interested more on the development side but wouldn’t mind trying it out either :)

It’s multilingual, default English :)

If you mean programming language: PHP. (Don’t worry, the “good”/OOP way ;-)).

I’m trying to get developer docs out there asap :)

I think Skyrail is talking about services such as the Digg or (upcoming) Fluther data access APIs?

PHP is a good language to use as it is very versitile and yes, with the APIs many sites have numerous ones from Digg to Last.fm. It’s all very interesting although I have never worked with APIs much myself I do know one or two people who use them frequently and have handled them before. It’s something that I should look into one day :) and once the dev-docs are released I’d more then willing to look at them :)

Yep, I’m making heavy use of API’s (as that’s the only safe way to retrieve the content, if you start HTML scraping then a minor change to the HTML can screw everything up).

For example, I’ve already implemented the Flickr API, and since 23 also uses that API you can also use that to retrieve photos from there.

The best API is RSS, however. Using RSS alone I can already display the latest Fluther questions (unfortunately Fluther doesn’t (yet) provide feeds per user), the latest dugg/submitted stories on Digg, and so on. The possibilities are endless :)

Ah RSS feeds, another possibly under used but brilliant API type system. I look forward to seeing the results :)

SecondBrain ?

SecondBrain also looks very much aimed at managing for yourself instead of creating a personal website. And it looks an awful lot like Twitter :)