Intro: 8hands promises to let you “access all your social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube etc.) from a single entry point,” as well as “know exactly what is happening on all of your social networks in real time.” Not only that, it lets you “chat via IM with your social network friends any time”.

Exec Sum: As we sign up for more services the idea of a “networking aggregator” becomes more appealing. This isn’t it: It’s aimed at one-eyed teenagers (see logo) and doesn’t really do what it promises to do. Don’t bother.

My tenminut.es:

Installation was pretty straightforward for something in alpha. I wasn’t crazy about the typo and the automatically checked bottom box, but that’s normal these days.

Add profiles from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr, and any kind of feeds you like, then watch them update in real time in one piece of software, which looks a bit like a chat client:

The four windows in order (there doesn’t seem to be a way to change/reorder/remove them, although you can minimize each one) are your name and a ‘tagline’ — it’s not clear what the tagline if for beyond notifying other 8hands users — then a ‘latest events’ window. This would be great, were it a) in proper chronological order (instead items seem random, with Facebook stuff missing and year-old Flickr comments prominent.)

Below that is a ‘top friends’ window, based, presumably, on activity. Not much use to me, frankly, except it can be changed to ‘favorite friends’ which is even less useful, as it seems to work only for other 8hands users.

The final window, a photo gallery of your (and others, if you like) photos, is marginally useful.

Verdict: Nice idea but not well executed. There’s definitely a market for applications that sit lightly on the desktop and help you both view your friends’ activities and update your social networking accounts easily.

This isn’t it: The four windows don’t really make monitoring your profiles and friends’ activities more efficient, and the implication that you should be inviting others to 8hands to make it more useful, means that instead of the software aggregating your existing networks, it actually is premised on you building another one with them.

The killer app is still one which will allow you to update all status messages in your social networks from a single application, and to selectively view the activities of your friends/contacts. As far as I know, this isn’t out there yet. All I know for sure is that 8hands is definitely not it.

Score: 4 out of 10.

Technorati Tags: networks, twitter, facebook, aggregators, flickr, myspace