Second Brain – The Online Content Collector

Lifestreaming is the latest social media buzzword. It means collecting all your online activities into a single feed that you can share with others. If you add friends on a social network or share photos with people you know, these activities become part of your lifestream. There are many sites that offer lifestreaming, but Second Brain does even more. Like other lifestreaming sites, it aggregates everything you do in social media, but you can also collect your online documents and files, making Second Brain very different from other lifestreaming applications. After completing the simple signup process, you can add bookmarks, import content from a range of sites or upload files to your Second Brain account. (There’s a 1000MB account limit.) Supported sites include Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, GoogleDocs, ZohoDocs, Box and several others.

Everything you add goes into your library, where you can decide which items are public and which are private. You can also sort items into collections and tag them in a way that makes sense to you. Your tags are automatically stored when you import content and you can add new tags too. This site has a lot of potential for those looking to keep track of their online life. However, it is more useful as a content collector than a lifestreamer. If you like keeping your files neatly arranged, then Second Brain offers a great opportunity to move that organization online.

Practical Uses

• Keep track of all your favorite web sites and your comments about them in one place
• Categorize your most frequently used business documents in a searchable library
• For big projects or special events, create collections which link websites, documents, photos, video, and audio into one organized package

Insider Tips

• There are privacy controls for the services and the items you share, so you can keep some collections and items private
• Share your content with the people who follow you and comment on their shared items to get the most from Second Brain

What We Liked

• Importing your content is very easy and the timeline interface is attractive
• Second Brain automatically consolidates your most used tags across all services and creates a tag cloud on your profile
• Every time you sign in, your lifestream updates automatically
• You can to include many different types of content in a collection
• You can control what parts of your collection people see with the privacy functions.

What We Didn’t Like

• Although importing a document from the desktop worked well, the iPaper reader was unable to read some of our documents
• There is no support for RSS feeds at this time

Alternatives

• Twine – http://www.twine.com
• Soup.io – http://www.soup.io

Company Info

• Launched: February 2008
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Oslo, Norway
• Founded by Lars Teigen
• Website: http://secondbrain.com

Costs:

• Free