PeopleBrowsr smashes social feeds together

PeopleBrowsr is a new service that can show you all your activity streams from various social sites and nanoblogs, like Twitter and Friendfeed. It also adds additional features to Twitter, such as grouping your contacts. It solves some real problems, but I found it clunky to use.

Users of the AIR app TweetDeck will get PeopleBrowsr immediately. Like TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr lets you open up multiple Twitter streams at once. You can see, for example, the Twitter stream from your friends, the stream of people replying to you, the stream from a continuously running search. PeopleBrowser displays three streams side-by-side. If you add more you have to scroll horizontally to see them, no matter how wide your monitor is.

PeopleBrowsr puts three personal feeds into one window.

PeopleBrowsr isn't limited to Twitter. You can also set up streams from Friendfeed, YouTube, Flickr, Seesmic, LinkedIn, and other services. You can have as many running as you like. PeopleBrowsr also lets you merge feeds together, so you can see, for example, all the activity in your YouTube and Flickr accounts in one single feed.

The service also lets you see PeopleBrowsr-specific profiles of the people in your streams. If you click on a name you can see everything the person wrote, as well as related links (which I assume the service picks up from reading their activity streams). You can tag people, and you're supposed to be able to create groups. But I could not find a way to sort contacts by tag nor a way to add people to groups.

The service is extremely rough right now. It's hard to use, slow, and its features are obscured under too many different non-standard interface elements (horizontally scrolling navigation menus? Come on). I generally will forgive a service a lack of refinement if its developers say it's still in alpha testing, as is the case for PeopleBrowsr. But I got the feeling, after talking to CEO Jodee Rich, that PeopleBrowsr fairly represents his design philosophy and aesthetic, and that we won't be seeing too many changes in the layout. I believe he's trying to cram too much of his vision into one browser window, and that an AIR app might be a better delivery mechanism. Rich clearly told me has a "no download" philosophy, though.

See also: Power.com (review), Meebo, Twhirl.

[GarryConn]

This looks really cool and almost perfect. It would be great if they added the ability to link up other social networks such as StumbleUpon and Reddit. All in all though, this is really great and it is free, so you can't beat that.

[PriscillaScala]

Thanks for taking the time to test and review PeopleBrowsr.

Here are a few points that I would like to add:

1. Horizontal Scrolling: if you have a big monitor and don't like scrolling, you can resize your PostStacks and your Gallery tiles by sliding the 'Resize' tool (now hidden in the left hand panel).
To make the use of this feature faster and more clear, we are moving the 'Resize' tool to the footer of the page and adding a tool tip to it. Thanks for the heads up.

2. Links: the links displayed in the person's profile (PBID) come from the Google Social Graph.
You can also see all the links that your friends posted by clicking on the 'Links' button in the footer of anyPostStack.

3. Groups and Tags: tagging someone means adding him to a specific group. Eg: when I tag you as CNet, you are automatically added to my CNet group. Groups can be public or private.
Again, the feature is hidden in the left hand panel now and we're happy to change the UI to make groups more clear and easier to retrieve - many users suggested that the groups board should be in the 'MyGroups' drop down: we're working with our designers to provide this in the next days.

4. Performance: We're focusing on the performance and trying to make PeopleBrowsr faster and smoother in every release of our Alpha.

5. Feedback and Changes: The PeopleBrowsr development team is located in the US, Australia and Germany, working in different time zones to be responsive to feedback.
We have a Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/peoplebrowsralphatesters and the support of a lot of Twitter users: 'Live' tweets and messages from the community are being used to build the product in real time. The Alpha release is updated every day. This is the reason why we want the Alpha to be completely open: we're shaping PeopleBrowsr on the feedback that we have from theTwitterverse and we are very thankful to the Twitter community for this great help.

Thanks again for this review and suggestions,
Best,
Priscilla Scala

[metatron57]

Nerdy people all over the world are having orgasms.

[vamman]

While the geeks could care less =)

[downunderbob]

isn't this a Jodee Rich creation? if so, should we trust anything he has to do with any company? Think One.Tel! I woudn't be trusting my log ins with this guy if my life depended on it!