One.Tel founder Jodee Rich’s new social media platform PeopleBrowsr made its public debut in alpha to the Twitterati community this week.
PeopleBrowsr, developed in Australia with the assistance of a global team of developers, is a meta-network for social networks currently based on Twitter and eventually being re-skinned as an interface for other social networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook.
The power of the new interface lies in its ability to aggregate personal and business social networks across multiple online social networks and create targeted purpose built text, image and video communications to tag-formed groups. While Rich has yet to reveal details of the commercial aspect of his application, he claims it will have enterprise and consumer commercialisation potential.
“We see it getting traction in the marketing and social media departments and agencies responsible for brand management,” he said.
Since releasing the alpha version to the Twitter community, Rich says that the team has received more than 2000 comments with the Sydney-based developer team using the interactive feedback to implement fixes, fine tuning the product ahead of the beta release due out in a few weeks. “Live” Tweets from the community are being used to build a new product in real time. The Alpha release is being updated daily.
The deep Java Script-based platform uses Mozilla FireFox 3, Safari 3.1 or Google Chrome (which has just come out of beta status), and transforms web browsers into a visual social media dashboard creating a grid gallery of organisable Tweets in the Twitter stream with additional distinct columns for “following” and replies. The dashboard provides integrated search functionality of Twitter directly within streams, users can also run hyper local searches to see who’s Tweeting in a certain city or regions. Searches can be additive for further refining of streams.
The platform has also introduced PeopleBrowsr IDs (PBIDs), a new genre of intelligent social media profiles which offers an instant and highly detailed overview of an individual’s presence across the social web by automatically aggregating their other network profiles and blogs as a social graph. Digital guru and founder of O’Reilly Media Tim O’Reilly describes the onset of new services such as PeopleBrowsr as “reframing service aggregation in a richer way”, as a way of learning more about the people you follow.
He said PeopleBrowsr has potential as a social graph explorer, rather than as yet another people feed-reader.
