Bring your social networks together with Minggl
Just yesterday a friend of mine told me he couldn’t handle joining another social network. He runs the new media program for a Fortune 500 company. Imagine how the rest of us feel. In the last eighteen months there have been a number of potential solutions, mostly portals and networks that, at the end of the day, end up adding yet another social network and more complication. Now it appears the solution may be in the form of a browser plug-in.
Minggl to the rescue – Minggl is an extension to Firefox and Internet Explorer that simplifies navigation and communication across popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and MySpace. Once installed, Minggl appears as a toolbar and allows the user to keep up to date on their friends’ feeds, update their own status, and bring together activities for all of their networks without signing on to each separately. Sounds simple, but behind the streamlined interface that the user sees a lot is happening behind the scenes.
Minggl CEO Dewey Gaedcke discussed the issues of multiple social networks with Helzerman’s Odd Bits and the need for a more logical way to bring the information to the user:
Social networks are not talking to each other and have no way of prioritizing or deciding how we want to see and share the information. If I see you at Starbucks and then I see you at a restaurant ten minutes later it’s almost like we have to introduce ourselves all over again. When I’m on multiple social networks I have multiple friends lists, multiple passwords, multiple communities, and more problems. With so much time being spent on Facebook, MySpace, etc., when do I have time to visit more specialized social networks? The Minggl agenda is to move the relationship layer as well as the automation of the more tedious stuff into the browser so the browser can carry social context with it.
Odd Bits, which had been reviewing Minggl for a few weeks, had held off on writing about it because new features continue to be added. Finally, we decided that Minggl is like a new gadget that keeps getting updated –there is never going to be an “ideal” time to review it. The bottom line is: it keeps getting better. Here is a look at the beta as it is today feature by feature.
MingglStream
MingglStream monitors your social networks and updates you on friend activity, such as when a friend posts an update on Twitter or a message on Facebook. The toolbar version (above) is great for those who want to see their streams continually or for those with smaller networks. Those with large networks may find the continuous rolling updates distracting. The toolbar setting can be turned off and there is a clickable sidebar view with an attractive Twitter-style column showing friend icons with updates.
Along with this are mStream filters that allow you to filter the information you receive from your sites in the MingglStream. Anyone with particularly verbose friends or who has been on the receiving end of chain-letter style gifting from Facebook, will love mStream filters.
Consolidated Friends List
A life saver for many will be the consolidated friends list which merges your friends from multiple social networks into one searchable, taggable list, and enables you to connect and communicate with them from anywhere on the web.
Quick account access
Minggl shows icons of your various networks in the tool bar allowing you to navigate to each in a single click. Best of all, Minggl remembers your credentials for each network so you do not have to enter your username and password each time you visit.
Status Blaster allows you to update all (or some –you decide by clicking on check boxes) of your networks from a single place).
Dewey Gaedcke gave Odd Bits a tour of soon to be released features and, although we can’t talk about them (yet), look for a review soon. For now, we’ll just close by saying that we’re excited about Minggl.
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This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 6:47 pm and is filed under News, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
