SecondBrain, definitely worth a second look

During the past few months, I’ve seen a specific start-up keep popping up: SecondBrain. It promised me to aggregate all my content in order to organize life 2.0. “Yeah yeah”, I thought, “Seen it, been there, done that – never worked for me”. So my attention went to one of the other twenty start-ups that are brought under my attention on a daily basis.

But last week, I received an invite from another blogger and Boris sent me a press release about the beta 2 launch of SecondBrain. So I decided to give SecondBrain a second chance (quite a corny line, uh?). Turns out that I might actually use this service. Why? Well, it does a really good job synchronizing the majority of the Web 2.0 services – from Flickr to Digg and from WordPress to Google Docs – ALL your content in stored in one huge media library. For some reason, this gives me a safe feeling. I have it all stored in one place, like a giant bookcase with my photo albums, video tapes, books, articles, and lots of uh.. bookmarks.

Apart from the safe feeling, in the end – that’s just personal, there are more advantages, particularly in the field of organizing:

• SecondBrain generates one tag cloud for all your online stuff.
• You can create collections, regardless of file types. This is easy for reference.
• There’s a rather solid search engine.

Founder Lars Teigen has told Mashable that SecondBrain focuses on organizing your content first, after that, they’ll add the unavoidable social layers. The new features of Beta 2 prove his point: the navigation has improved, you now have 1GB for personal file uploads and, ok, there’s a share function.

Personally, I don’t need a social touch to SecondBrain. For that purpose, I use the services with which SB is synchronizing. I just want to look up all my saved content about my favorite band, hobby, or travel destination – just like a real bookshelf.