In part 3 of my look at mc aggregators [here are parts 1 and 2], I get stuck into Suprglu. In this post I ask the question: how sticky is this site? But enough puns, let’s get down to business. SuprGlu, a production of New York design studio Iridesco, is another product that enables users to collect their content from various services (flickr, delicious, etc) and put it in one place.
Of the 3 such products I’ve profiled so far – 43Things, PeopleFeeds and Suprglu – the easiest one to use is Suprglu. The step-by-step set-up process is user-friendly and includes a long list of possible content sources:
43 Things All Consuming Blogger Clipmarks del.icio.us Digg Flickr Last.fm LiveJournal Simpy WordPress.com
If anything, it made me feel guilty for not having enough content sources! 🙂 It did seem to take a while for Suprglu to fetch the feeds, but it was a relatively minor issue. All in all, Suprglu has a nicely designed and helpful user interface.
Style a big plus
The other feature that stands out about Suprglu is the ability to not only choose from a range of default page designs, but you can also customize your CSS and create your own design. I haven’t had time to do that myself, but a good example is Emily Chang’s Suprglu page. So in effect, you can create a brand new blog based on all of your content sources – and you can style it just as you would a Movable Type or WordPress blog. I can see this becoming increasingly appealing, as more and more content ‘buckets’ appear on the Web for users to create content in. An aggregate blog to be a home for all that content would be very handy.
It also strikes me that commercial websites like Edgeio and Amazon should be rapt with services like Suprglu and PeopleFeeds. Because it’s so easy to aggregate using Suprglu, it encourages consumers to collect and ‘own’ the content they input into edgeio or Amazon – and that theoretically encourages people to input content into many places. Of course, that behoves commercial companies to offer RSS feeds for user-generated content (I know edgeio does, but not Amazon to my knowledge).
Suprglu is made out of open source technologies, including Ruby on Rails. Emily Chang interviewed the founders back in December and got this neat quote from them about what it does:
“SuprGlu is about allowing people to pick up the bits and pieces of themselves scattered around the web and being able to put it all together in the form of a digital scrapbook.”
As far as my Suprglu page goes, I found the tags to be useful but minimalist (nowhere near as impressive as PeopleFeeds). It also only has one single RSS feed – for the whole page. No RSS feeds for tags/categories (that I could see) and no filtering options. So both 43Things and PeopleFeeds offer much more functionality in that respect. The main attraction to Suprglu is the ability to style your page – and in effect use it as your main blog.
Personal Content Networks
Finally I want to highlight a comment that Dick Costolo from Feedburner left on my previous post, about PeopleFeeds. Dick wrote:
“I love this concept. Let all the focused applications that are the best in their domains be the content management systems for that kind of content and then provide a framework for me to pull it all together. These kinds of Personal Content Networks will be a bigger and bigger part of the landscape. Very cool.”
Personal Content Networks is a great term and neatly captures the value that services like 43Things, PeopleFeeds and Suprglu offer for users. Every day on the Web a new website turns up that wants “user-generated content” added to it – Flickr, delicious, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Digg, blogs of course, social networks like MySpace and Facebook, edgeio, Nooked, BBC – the list goes on. I have a feeling we’ll be needing more of these personal Microcontent Aggregators before long.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)