Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Aggregate Yourself With Ziki
byZiki is a service that is more or less the same as Suprglu, another online service that I wrote about sometime ago, with one small, but interesting difference. A social networking factor has been added. Other than that, you’re looking at the same set of tools to allow you to aggregate all of your online activity under one roof. Posts from different blogs, photos kept on different hosting services, and anything else that provides an RSS feed to grab the information from all the sites you are active on. You can also tag just about everything on the site, which is then used to organize and help locate other people and groups with the same interests. Altogether, Ziki has built a very nice and easy to use system.
While I don’t visit my Suprglu page a lot, I like knowing that everything I’m doing is being carefully preserved in one spot. It did come in handy a few months ago, when one of my blogs had its database mangled (backup, backup, backup!). While I didn’t have a traditional backup, I was able to copy and paste everything from my Suprglu account. Ziki affords the same peace of mind, but also lets you take advantage of having all your content in one spot by making connections with others based on shared interests and even what you’re looking for, such as a job, or selling ad space on your blog.
I’ve mentioned before that I think social network sites need to rely more on what people are already doing and reuse that where they can — in other words, don’t build another photo gallery into your site when I can use Flickr or other photo hosting/sharing sites. Ziki takes that to the extreme and, personally, I really like that. I’m honestly surprised there aren’t more services like Ziki and Suprglu that are taking advantage of the openness and sharing of many of the current Web 2.0 flavored sites. Building a new service on top of what I’m already doing elsewhere is very attractive to me. Ziki seems to be thinking that way, and I’m interested to see where they take it.
