Social Networking Web Design

With the rise of social networking, many of us have hundreds if not thousands of online contacts. But how many of them do we actually keep up with? Probably not many. That’s the problem Zentact attempts to solve through a new service that keeps track of all your contacts across email and social networks and alerts you to relevant opportunities to reconnect as you browse the Web.

For example, let’s say Pete Cashmore is in my address book. Zentact lets me tag him with topics that I know might be interesting to Pete, like social media, blogging, or Mashable. Then, let’s say I’m searching Google for social media tools, and I suddenly find myself on Mashable.com. If I’ve installed Zentact’s Firefox plugin, an alert will pop-up notifying me that it’s a good time to contact Pete, since I’m on Mashable reading about social media. In the alert, Zentact tells me the last time I contacted Pete, and lets me know why the page might be interesting to him. From there, I can email the link along with a personal message.

You can imagine this being applied to much more real-world situations – if you tag someone with a more obscure interest – say, fly fishing - you’ll get an alert to contact them whenever you happen to stumble upon a relevant page, anywhere on the Web. This is already the way people communicate today – but it’s typically only within their inner circle of friends that they already know well. Zentact aims to make it something you can do with everybody to strengthen your relationships.

On its website, Zentact lets you manage all your contacts, either by importing your email address book or adding them manually. You also get a tag cloud, so you can connect different contacts that share the same interests. Additionally, you can sync Zentact with your Twitter account, so if you’d rather @reply to someone than email them when an alert pops up, you can do so, assuming you have the other person’s Twitter name.

Zentact is founded by the same team that built and sold MyBlogLog to Yahoo. Much like MBL, Zentact is a new and incredibly innovative way to connect people that makes you go “why didn’t I think of that?” With this project, the team is certainly onto something that could go well beyond the blogging and social media niche, though, they’ll obviously want to offer its plugin in browsers other than Firefox. If you’d like to try it out, sign up here.

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Microsoft Live Labs has just released Thumbtack, a new online notebook service of sorts, allowing you to create different collections where you can store links and content and share it with friends. Microsoft offers a few examples of how you might want to use this: finding a new apartment with your roommate, creating a list of your favorite restaurants, or storing data on different cars if you’re in the market for one.

The most comparable competitor is probably Google Notebook, which lets you create an unlimited number of lists that can be shared with your contacts. Just like Notebook, Thumbtack offers a bookmarklet so you can add to your collections as you browse the Web. Here’s a demo of Thumbtack from the Live Labs team:

Video: Thumbtack Introduction

I could see this being somewhat useful for very specific tasks, but generally speaking, simple bookmarking and tagging of Web pages works just fine for organizing links I’d like to remember. Do you think Thumbtack is something you’d use? Or, are you using any online notebook tool for that matter?

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