Secondbrain announced its beta launch a few weeks back, and we helped to kick things off right with a Mashable-sponsored contest to win a MacBook Air for some of the early testers of the site. Similar to Twine and Evernote, Second Brain represents the next generation of personalized bookmarking and content organization tools, moving towards the semantic web.
Now that the beta launch has officially arrived, I shot some questions over to Second Brain founder and CEO Lars Georg Teigen to hear some more details about the content aggregator that bookmarks your web content amongst other things. Teigen responded as follows:
Kristen Nicole of Mashable: In terms of importing data like documents, is this done only through Zoho & Google docs, or is there a desktop app for SecondBrain or any other way to add items from the PC?
I think that allowing users to see all these content types together will empower them to work smarter with their content online.
Kristen Nicole: So for exporting or republishing the collected data for individual users, what are the options there?
Teigen: Just as we expect other services to have open platforms and allow users to build apps and mashups on their data, Secondbrain is going to provide similar if not better features for widetizing, republishing and exporting content. Today we have RSS feeds from most of our pages, including collections and recent updates. The first think will introduce after the Beta 2 release are options for widgetizing collections so that you can put them on your blogs etc. Later we'll have an Open API.
Kristen Nicole: Now, about data portability; how, specifically, are you utilizing data portability standards?
Teigen: We keep a close look on the development of standards for portability of content and the social graph. But we have decided to not invest too much in this right now, before the standards have matured, and we have reached a certain quality level on the basic organization, recommendation and search features we want to provide in our service. We'll get our own app ready first, and then we'll hook up with all open standards that are relevant for us. But of course, we have built the Beta 1 and 2 so that it will be "easy" to make us compatible in the future.
Kristen Nicole: How are you hoping Second Brain will be used as a search platform in the future (or now)?
Teigen: Our primary focus right now is to focus on personal value - make Secondbrain the best place to organize your content online, and then add features for collaboration and socialization (we already have a few social features of course). We need to build a certain level of content before we can come out as a destination for the general public to find good content.
We already see that we get 22% of our traffic from search engines (mostly Google). We've made our pages so that it is easy for search engines to index us.
For example, one of our users: julie.secondbrain.com made a collection on "larp costumes" (I had no idea what it was. It's Live Action Role Play Costumes...:)) And if you do a search on Google for larp costume, Julie's collection is on the first page on the Google search results. That's a pretty powerful thing. Imaging the long tail of users - the collectors and organizers creating collections on just about anything. That is a great index of human organized content.
And my vision is to become a source for good user generated content one the same level as Wikipedia is a source for encyclopedic content. Think about services like Mahalo - they employ people to create "collections" of content - we, powered by the personal motivation of our users, have a bottom-up self organizing library that can take advantage of the long tail of UCG.
So first - we create a service that solves a problem for the individual - organize All Your Content online and manage their relationship to various social media services.
Then, we add features that enable users to socialize and collaborate on their content.