Tools of the Times – Part I
When I stumbled upon this site and looked at the tool for a minute or two, I thought, “hey this could be interesting”. After I entered my email and fed it my contact list of 450 people, I went from interested, to amazed, to nervous, all in about 3 minutes. I think for what the tool was designed to do, it works well, and was nice to see people I never even thought to track down in mySpace or Facebook. It also felt a bit like I was intruding, since most of these people post to site not ever thinking that a tool like this would come along.
So whats the tool, and what does it do? You feed it a list of email addresses and it goes and searches 22 sites (everything from flickr, picasa, myspace, to your wish list at amazon.com) and brings you a list of your “friends” (or anyone you have an email address for) and their pictures, blog posts, twitter thoughts, and products they hope to soon buy.
The first thing I thought, is oh boy, I hope that at some point I didn’t add anything embarrassing to my wish-list on amazon. It was a brutal reminder that everything you post on-line sticks around for a very long time and can and will be found, even if you don’t intend it to. Don’t get me wrong, this is a amazing little tool they have going one here. It will consolidate my social networking for my business in ways I couldn’t have imagined just yesterday. You can enter yourself and track all of the places you network in one central hub.
I guess this is the way we are trending with the web. Web 1.0 connected information, web 2.0 connects people. Give it a shot and let me know your feeling on this tool and implication on privacy and your social networking plan.
