hackr

english edition


Soup Goes Beta Tasty Nanopublishing

Vienna is probably best known for its Schnitzels. But the first company backed by Austrias YCombinator clone YEurope is soup, which is the latest entrant in the social media aggregation / lifestream / nanopublishing space.

The site was launched about three months ago and was rereleased in public beta yesterday. In their own words:

Soup is a mixture of a tumblelogging and lifestream aggregation platform. Soup simplifies publishing a stream of content by reducing mental overhead and removing barriers found in traditional blogging software.

screenshot soup.io

Like SuprGlu soup lets you aggregate your activities at various services and republish them in one central place, like Tumblr soup lets you easily post tasty media snacks (snippets of text, quotes, links, photos or videos), like Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, etc. soup lets you subscribe to the streams of your friends.

It will be interesting to see how soup will fit into this plethora of tools, but it might fill a niche since it systemically discourages obsessive self promotion. Users have to find a balance between what they want to broadcast about themselves and the time it takes their friends to consume this output considering that they have other friends who also are publishing. It is possible to scan the tweets and headlines of a few hundred people, but you only can browse the full lifestream of maybe a dozen or two – and even then there is a risk of creating too much output and being dropped if you upoad fifty photos to flickr or bookmarks to del.icio.us every day.

Related services from Germany we have covered recently are Identoo and Intuuch

On a sidenote since speaking about Schnitzels: the Austrian naming conventions seem to be heavily inspired by food, shnitzl is a cute social event manager, the widget is called Katchup

screenshot soup.io

Company soup: kitchen

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)

☍ 31.10.2007 # soupio micropublishing