Boot Up Your Second Brain

What do you mean you haven’t got a second brain? They’re all the rage! Forget FriendFeed or FeedFriend or whatever it’s called, SecondBrain (like the initials, reminds me of ScienceBase) is where the social aggregators are…well….aggregating these days.

According to the site: “Secondbrain is your personal content library. We make it really easy to keep track of all the content that you have online. Bookmark web-pages and import content from your favorite internet-services. Organize everything in collections and share your lifestream on your public page. Find a home for all your content in Secondbrain.”

But, don’t take their word for it, fellow blogger Phil Butler over on Search Engine Journal, suggests that SecondBrain really isn’t just a FeedFriend clone, it’s a whole lot more. This is how Butler puts it:

FriendFeed is essentially a “Twitter like” instant notification of people’s activity around content. The service is well designed and effective for what it does, but SecondBrain is a much deeper platform for sharing and building life streaming events and content. SecondBrain uses API access for more in depth access to services while FriendFeed utilizes RSS to grab snippets of information.

You can pipe in your accounts from Digg, flickr, twitter, faves.com, Metaweblog, Wordpress, box, Google Docs, Slideshare, Mindmeister, Zoho, Revver, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, Youtube, and other social media and bookmarking sites, very quickly and easily.

You can then browse and search all your content, organize content into collections, keep track of your content in a single library, share your lifestream, and find people through content, and content through people. Intriguingly, SecondBrain is based in Norway and was established by Lars Teigen of Making Waves fame.

Teigen is on record as saying:

Being early stage is both a challenge and an opportunity. The main challenge is to be able to launch and grow the community even though everything is not finished yet. But the opportunity – and this is great – is that anything and everything is possible.

Incidentally, the name Second Brain is not, presumably, derived from 1990s scientific research that suggested the gut, the stomach and intestine, has a near-autonomous nervous system that behaves as a “second” brain within us.

UPDATE: SecondBrain beta 2 is already out, and offeres 1 Gb of free storage space, so even if you don’t use it for all your social media stuff you could use it as an online file repository. For a warning about this kind of site, however, check out my post on PageOnce beta. (I wish they’d give up on all this “beta” labeling and just put the products out there).