PeopleBrowsr Brings Power to Twitter and Others

PeopleBrowsr is a new service, currently Alpha 0.692, that aims to tie your social networks and profiles together. You can view all your data from your networks in one place. Simply sign in with your Twitter account and add your other logins once you get in. Services currently supported include: Flickr, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Photobucket, Upcoming, and Webpage. Alpha 0.7 officially launched 12/2/2008.

What’s Cool

• Gallery view allows you to browse your friends’ updates using a grid of their avatars. Simply moving your mouse over their picture shows a popup with their latest posts.
• Stream view is probably more like we’re used to, but you have full control over what services are visible and where they’re positioned within the interface.
• You can tag your friends and organize them into groups
• PeopleBrowsr also works as a PeopleWiki. This means you can share what you know about your friends and it will show up on their profiles.
• The Twitter features are well implemented, including ReTweet, Reply, Favorite, and DM.
• You can view Photos and videos within the interface.

What’s Still Alpha

This service has a lot of potential. We are all looking for a way to handle more things at once and PeopleBrowsr could be the solution we need. The main problem is that many cool features, and even some of the simplest ones, are buried beneath a confusing and somewhat disjointed interface. It’s a bit more flashy than useful at this point, but we must remember that it’s still alpha.

It also remains to be seen how PeopleBrowsr handles a load. I learned about it last week from a post on FriendFeed by Robert Scoble. Since it was Scobleizer recommended and approved, the service was swamped with users in a very short time and it slowed to a crawl. I’m sure we have all seen our fair share of Fail Whales, so I’m hoping PeopleBrowsr will have the scalability issue taken care of before it really hits prime time.

Some people already love it, some are waiting to see what happens with it. Which are you?