Use Upscoop to manage your multiple Social Networking sites

del.icio.us |Digg it |Netscape |reddit |StumbleUpon |Yahoo MyWeb |Print This Post
Add this to your favourites

Upscoop is a awesome new service which allows you to upload your email address box and find all your friends on all the major social networks and online communities such as MySpace, Friendster, Classmates, Flickr, Hi5 and many more. If anyone of you has used Trillian or Gaim, you would understand the benefit of such a site. Using Trillian, you can import your contact list from MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ to one single window, giving you much better control than launching all these seperate messengers.

Now, most of us belong to more than one of these social network and as Nick Gonzalez at TechCruch points out, keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.

How does UpScoop do all this? Upscoop figures out the networks of your friends based on their email address which is imported from your email (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) account. Upscoop, using your contact list, searches a number of social networks and tries to find the profile pages of your friends based on their indexed database. Once the results are displayed, you can see which social networks your friends use and then you can either add your friends to your existing social network or join the sites they use.

Downsides:

1. The search process of finding the networks to which your friends belong is not instantaneous and might take a couple of hours to one day. I am guessing a lot more people would be willing to put up with this wait if they have a sign up page for Upscoop where they store all their profile and contact information. This might also be good in the long term, allowing Upscoop more control over user retention. My guess on why they are not doing this: Probably they are not large scale enough or maybe they just don’t want to deal with the security issues of maintaining the user names and passwords of their visitors.

2. Getting people to fork over their usernames and passwords might be a tough sell. Upscoop tells us that they do not store your password not do they email/spam any of your contacts.

3. The only email services you can use are AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. However, it is easy to say that they cover almost 90% of all the people out there using a free email service. Another downside is that say you have multiple Gmail addresses with your contact list distributed. You cannot add additional email addresses after you have already signed-in to one of the email clients mentioned above.

Update: Auren Hoffman, the CEO of Rapleaf updated us on one small point. At the end of the post we mentioned:
“You cannot add additional email addresses after you have already signed-in to one of the email clients mentioned above.”

In Auren’s words

“Actually, you can add more friends once you log in.   we have had a lot of users do that today … seems they may have upload 200 friends from their gmail and then uploaded another 100 which may have been sitting somewhere else (in my case, they were on Outlook).”

 

del.icio.us |Digg it |Netscape |reddit |StumbleUpon |Yahoo MyWeb |Print This Post