8hands’ Ten Minutes August 20, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in blogging, connectivity, presence, social networking.trackback
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
What are you talking about? the top friends is a brilliant idea! It allows you to keep track on activity with friends and lets you know if there are spammers among your so called friends.
I use this software and I’m pleased with it.
They’re far from accomplishing everything they’ve promised, but it’s inevitably when your using software in alpha.
I found it very useful, and I hope 8hands will develop as said.
Hi Jeremy,
I was sorry to see that 8hands isn’t exactly your cup of tea, though I believe that a huge part of 8hands wasn’t clear to you. Obviously, if you didn’t understand something, we are the blame for that, as we didn’t explain some features as we should, or parts of the user interface were confusing. We are working on simplifying things, and trying to understand exactly how 8hands should work – that is why we are in a public alpha stage, and posts like yours will only help us make 8hands better.
However, your post missed a lot of 8hands features and I would like to correct that. First off, the scorecard is a lot more than just “your name and a tagline”. It contains a fast way to connect to all of your network locations in a click, as well as your overall number of friends & overall activity level. You wrote that “it’s not clear what the tagline if for beyond notifying other 8hands users”, so, it’s important that you’ll know that our tagline can sync with Twitter, so you can update your Twitter straight from your desktop. In time, we will add a feature to update all of your networks status line, from our tagline – just like you asked for.
You also complained about random items from all dates in the “Latest Events” – It’s a problem we’ve been having only after adding your locations & networks for the first time. After you’ll restart 8hands the items in the “Latest Events” will be organized by date, and from that point on you’ll only get new items into your “Latest Events”. If you want to see past events, you can always open your 8hands history.
The bottom’s “Media Gallery” is just a small widget to make your eyes happy, probably as you thought. But what you didn’t notice is that you can go from it directly to the “Media Zone”, which is a gallery of all your or your chosen friends’ social networks media (photos or videos from Flickr, Youtube, MySpace, Facebook and such).
The “Media Zone” I’ve mentioned works great with another part of 8hands you didn’t find very useful – the IM and the “Favorite Friends” list. If you combine the two, you can have great “Instant Media” chats, in which the users can drag items from the “Media Zone” into the chat window and share videos & photos with each other.
Anyway, we pay respect to any comment we get – good or bad – and we use them all to improve 8hands.
If you have any question or other issues you would like to discuss, feel free to e-mail me to alonu (at) 8hands (dot) com.
Thanks a lot,
Alon
The 8hands Mega Team
Thanks, Alon and Pete for the comments. It’s perhaps unfair of me to put something in alpha through its paces and I’m happy to take another look at this further down the track.
I think there’s a great product here trying to get out. This site, though, is about products revealing themselves intuitively and quickly, and I think 8hands needs a lot of work to do that. I also think most users will not be interested in adding an extra layer of friends on a new service, but they would be interested in something that reduces time, effort and double-posting for their existing networks.
I think 8hands would work best if it was just that — a console to aggregate and control existing profiles.
Best, Jeremy
[...] Conclusion: AirTalkr has a homemade feel to it and requires quite a bit more work. But the idea is a sound one. I think it’s inevitable, and desirable, that instant messaging dovetails more efficiently with social networking sites, so it would be great if a tool like this could manage that better. (For a less convincing attempt see 8hands which I reviewed here.) [...]