So far, to connect with your friends online, there are a few tools available: destination sites like Spokeo lets you know what people do across several social platforms; Friendfeed does the same, but enhances this experience by adding extra social features to their platform; Flock also allows you to keep track of your friends’ activities online, except that Flock is a browser all to itself (here’s a good list of social aggregators).
Quite frankly, all the players in this arena have developed great technologies to track online friends activities, but most of them fail so far to make this information easy to access and interact with. Yoono is yet another friend aggregator. What singles Yoono out from the competition is the Yoono browser-based widget that lets users connect directly to their Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Flickr accounts (Myspace coming). Not only do users receive live updates from those social platforms, but they can send updates and replies directly from the widget, without having to leave the page they are browsing.
Of course, Yoono is also a social network all to itself, as it enables users to connect with each other and share bookmarked material like webpages, photos and videos. Sharing multimedia files can be done through IM, where the content is viewable by the recipient directly in the chatting environment. As you can see in the video, the Yoono widget stands on the left of the browser. Hiding the sidebar is at a tip of a click. Is the widget slowing the browser down? I have not experienced any of that so far. Yoono is a light app, and recommended by Mozilla Firefox.
On the downside – other bloggers noticed it too – the widget tends to be too small to show the activity of several hundreds of friends across several social platforms. Guillaume Thonier, US VP of Engineering, says in the video that the development team is well-aware of this weakness, and that a solution to tackle it shall see the day around the end of June.
Quite honestly, it doesn’t beat Twhirl in terms of Twitter updates but its diversity of social services makes it a perfect browsing companion.
More info about Yoono:
Yoono browser plugin makes Firefox more like Flock – Download Squad
Head-to-Head Comparison with Digsby, Flock – Mashable
Do Yoono – Social Media Club
Yoono takes aggregation in a new direction – The Guidewire