Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill August 1st, 2007

I have written previously about my wish for a social network dashboard that will let me manage my presence on multiple platforms. It is admittedly a pipe dream since no service I am aware of publishes an API for account management information- and probably never will for fear of privacy issues.

Still, I was intrigued to see ProfileBuilder’s launch this weekend and I checked it out. Unfortunately it looks as though they weren’t really ready to launch at all. There’s no explanation of what the site actually does and the text is rife with typos. More to the point, it doesn’t work whatsoever with Firefox on my Mac. Maybe the traffic they picked up from the TechCrunch crowd will stay with them until they get the site working properly, but it sure seems like a shaky start- the downside of the “Launch Early and Often” ethos.

As far as I can tell, the site aggregates content from whatever feeds I add to my profile. Aggregation is useful- Lijit is a nice tool that offers cross-platform searches of my content. It would be really great if I could aggregate (or maybe even just search) comments I have made across the internet in one location, but I don’t see the value of piling up all my content in yet one more dead end. If I can’t post from it and I can’t administer my other various presences with it, then I definitely don’t need another place to send people. Lijit is useful because it works inside my existing networks.

I am scaling back my wish. For now, all I want is a single point from which I can send out social network “friends” invitations. I list which networks I want to invite someone to, then they can check the boxes to accept one or all in one fell swoop. Should be simple, right?

• Web , social media