PeopleBrowsr: A Visual Dashboard for Your Online Identities
Imagine TweetDeck as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With PeopleBrowsr, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Seesmic, identi.ca, Photobucket, upcoming, and FriendFeed.
About PeopleBrowser
Keeping tabs on all the happenings across the social web can be a challenge. For some, FriendFeed is the destination of choice as it lets you see streams of information from all your friends as they share, comment, and participate in social media. Others find the application too noisy, as it requires a lot of manual tweaking and filtering to remove unwanted content.
A good alternative for those who want to keep up with the social web in a more organized fashion is PeopleBrowsr, a virtual dashboard for tracking your online identities. It's very much inspired by TweetDeck with panels that you scroll through horizontally. It also has a "Groups" feature, but its implementation was somewhat confusing. We'll give it a pass for now, though, as the application is still in alpha.
How To Use It
To get started with PeopleBrowsr, you simply add your online IDs and authorize the PeopleBrowsr service when necessary, as with flickr and YouTube. Once you're finished, you can then switch over to the PeopleBrowsr app itself.
There are actually two different views to choose from: the stream view (which resembles TweetDeck) and the Gallery view which lays out the avatars of your friends across the page. You must select your view of choice upon login. In the Gallery view, you can click on friends' avatars to see their latest updates and then interact with those updates accordingly, depending on what network you are browsing at the time.
To select the network you want to see, there's a navigation bar at the top left side of the page. You can scroll through the various online sites listed, selecting those you want displayed. In the Stream view, this is more practical as it loads up each new network in a separate panel, letting you then scroll horizontally from Twitter, to flickr, to YouTube, etc.
Your Streams
Each network provides different options for the types of views you can add to your paneled view. Clicking on the network from the navigation bar (see above) will add some default views to the window, but you can also choose to add other views from the navigation bar above the streams themselves. For Twitter, the views to choose from may include things like Replies and your Friends Timeline, for Flickr it includes options like Favorites and Friends' photos, and for YouTube, it includes your videos, your favorites, and so on.
PeopleBrowsr also has "PeopleTags" which let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups. This feature wasn't entirely intuitive to use because the "My Groups" option appears at the top of the page even when no groups have been created. It seems to respond to a click but does nothing even though you're assuming that it will open up a pane for group creation as in TweetDeck. However, as you click on the individual posted items in your streams, you have the option of tagging them in order to create groups which then makes the "My Groups" link functional.
PeopleBrowsr Shows Promise
For an alpha app, this is a great first start. There are still some tweaks, like the Groups feature for example, that need to be made. Also, although it was possible to add a FriendFeed ID, FriendFeed did not appear in the top navigation for some reason. Without its inclusion, this would be an incomplete application. The app was also slow at times, once even crashing Firefox entirely. However, it's hard to tell for sure whether that's the app at fault or the pre-beta OS the testing was done on. That said, PeopleBrowsr definitely looks like a promising tool to organize your social streams in ways that make sense to you.
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Sarah,
Thanks for taking the time to test and review our first Open Alpha,
Grouping: We are working on grouping to make the UI more clear, it should get better in the next Alpha releases, thanks for your kindness and understanding.
Gallery and Stream: You now have the option to select your view at login, but we also allow people to switch, once inside the site. Maybe we should remove the two entering options, to make it clear that you can navigate views as you like while using the site.
Tags: Your description of tags and groups is perfect: "PeopleTags let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups". Thanks.
MyGroups: We are going to add a hint to make the 'MyGroups' link more clear, thanks for the heads up on this.
FriendFeed: To see FriendFeed in your navigation bar, click on the "+" icon. We're still fixing a couple of Safari bugs on this.
Performance: Many of the browser's performance issues were fixed in the Alpha Release uploaded last night.
We really appreciate your kindness and support for our Alpha.
Best,
Priscilla
Hmm. Great idea but the interface and the way it's working isn't very pleasing.
I personally will keep using Netvibes together with widget for exactly this.
Much like Power.com, this make me questions how many people need an aggregator? Sure, there is a core of prolific social networkers and social media users with active identities across many sites, but I think most people probably have 2 or 3 accounts and using something like this complicates more than it helps.
I also believe that the sites themselves should be where the action takes place -- it's always going to be tough to replicate all functionality elsewhere -- but with Single Sign On and a portable social graph being the way the sites are made easier to use.
As far as managing messages are concerned, I'm crying out for a "mail" client that shows all my messages in one place and listed in the same way, regardless of whether they are e-mails, tweets, IM or something else.
For me, Peoplebrowsr is doing some clever stuff but in the wrong place.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
I really like the option to choose different views - this looks like a promising alternative to some of the aggregators out there.
@ Ian, as for managing messages, we are launching an alpha version of a product to do just that (among other things). If you are interested in participating in the mobile pilot, it will begin next week. Visit www.socialibrium.com
A desktop-based version is in the works for early '09
- Ray
Would love to Ray, but there's an error coming when I try and register on your site. Is it struggling with a UK based phone number perhaps?
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Hm, interface is a little awkward. It's not obvious how to add accounts other than Twitter, Youtube and Flickr.
Nice look at PeopleBrowsr. I love it already. I have a video with the CEO, Jodee Rich, who commented above where he demos the coolest parts of PeopleBrowsr to me: http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118-scobleizer/280023-peoplebrowsr-launches -- hope you like that.
With the growing number of social media and their usage, I guess tools like these save lot of time while allowing people to keep up with friends from various networks. I personally found this useful. But I wish for a desktop client, which will relieve me of the worry about my password privacy.
Look forward to the desktop client launch.