In December of last year, we highlighted the introduction of PeopleBrowsr, a Web-based utility to help you follow all your friends across their various social networks in one place, ranging from LinkedIn to YouTube, FriendFeed and Twitter. The product, while very robust in terms of its offerings, also seemed complex, with usability tradeoffs seemingly made for feature introductions. With several months of incubation, the site has now opened up in public beta, hoping to supplant TweetDeck and other multi-column tools, like Seesmic Desktop.The service, which you can find at www.peoplebrowsr.com, bills itself as a "one-stop solution for managing online activity," and there's no doubt that's exactly what it does. You can add what are called "stacks" or columns from 14 different networks, and have the option to push updates to each from the single browser window.
Click Here for A Larger Image of PeopleBrowsr In Action
PeopleBrowsr's goal, like other aggregation services, is to help you tame the content stream and avoid missing important posts. The service also hopes to make itself the center for conversations by letting you manage multiple user names, and follow anonymously, without the public friending that takes place on practically every network.
As we also have discussed with our recent posts on search, finding your data can be even more important than seeing it as it appears, and PeopleBrowsr has approached that as well, by offering search filtering, and the saving of searches for future use.
Like TweetDeck, the temptation to keep adding "stacks" or columns is tempting. I can follow all friends' updates on FriendFeed and Twitter with PeopleBrowsr, while watching out for updates on LinkedIn, YouTube or even RSS. Really, the only limit to the product now is the width of your screen.