With all the Buzz surrounding Buzz, many of us have forgot about all the other services out there vying for the privilege of serving as our lifestream or aggregator. You have the old stand-by, FriendFeed which is still alive and kicking despite being purchased by Facebook. Cliqset is improving all the time. There are still others, including a little known service called Nsyght.
Easy Registration
Nsyght has been around for about 2yrs, but has recently received a round of funding and has since grown from a simple social search site to a full fledged social aggregator. Signing up is simple because you don’t actually have to sign up, simply register using your existing Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Clickpass, or OpenID account.
Adding Accounts
Once inside, head on over to Settings > Services to attach your Nsyght account to all your different social media networks. Currently, these include: StumbleUpon, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, Digg, OpenID, Clickpass, Google, and Yahoo. In addition to pulling in your content, most of these can also be used to login later. Nsyght uses OAuth so you don’t have to tell it your passwords.
General Usage
From here, most things work as expected. You’re looking at a river of all the content from your social networks. You can post items via Nsyght and have them also post to your other sites. A set of filters in the sidebar lets you focus on one specific services, simply click the ones you want to see. This is helpful if one particular service happens to be burying the rest.
What Makes it Different
While Nsyght has most of the features you would expect to find from any other social media aggregator service, it’s approach is very interesting. By definition, an aggregator is supposed to pull things together and help you keep your self organized. Rather than visiting multiple different websites to try and keep track of your friends’ activities, you can monitor everything from one place.
What actually happened with most of these services is that they came with their own social graph and their own comments for each item you import. Instead of being able to manage all your social networks and services from one place, you just end up with yet another social network to keep track of.
Part of why we built nsyght was to help users really take advantage of data portability. Instead of building a service that would encourage you to leave your network behind, we wanted to build something that could give you cool tools and services that helped you get more out of your existing social network, while allowing you to keep all your various profiles up to date. At the end of the day, we all (theoretically) have lives and jobs to do, so doing more with less seems pretty appealing.
When you comment on an item in Nsyght, your comment shows up in Nsyght as well as on the site the item came from. If you Like an item, you get a similar result. All in all, definitely worth a look and I’m sure they would appreciate your feedback.