Keep track of what your friends are doing online seems like it would be easy, but it's not. Given that most of us are using several different services — Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, the list goes on -- keeping track of it all is serious pain.
But these are your friends, and knowing what they're doing and sharing shouldn't be rocket science, which is where a new web service by the name of Iminta can help.
Iminta just launched today and it's still a private beta, but the site promises to provide an easy way to keep track of what your friends are doing online and allows you to offer them an easy way to keep track of you.
Iminta (I'm into… get it?) pulls in all the public information from the services we all love, like Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us and the other usual suspects of web 2.0. then Iminta allows you to group that data into a single stream and share parts or all of it with anyone you choose.
It works a bit like FriendFeed, but offers much more control over who sees what.
Getting started is dead simple. The service is currently in a private beta, but your can sign up to receive an invite. Once you've created a username and password, Iminta will present a screen listing all the services it can connect to. Just enter your username for each service and Iminta will do the rest.
The interface and design of Iminta a very nice and heavy use of Ajax means there's very few page loads — most things happen in the background allowing you to look around even as Iminta is working.
Once your data is in Iminta you can connect with users through the site, or simply use Iminta a way of pulling together all your own activity into one stream and then share that with friends by offering an all-in-one RSS feed.
For instance, if you have accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Digg and Del.icio.us, in order to see what you're doing I would need to subscribe to each of those sites separately and follow you. With Iminta, you could compile all the feeds in one place and just send me the integrated RSS feed or page to follow along.
Of course you could use FriendFeed, Plaxo and half a dozen other services to do the same, but what sets Iminta apart from the pack is the ability to control who sees what. Whereas most services of this sort simply allow for each incoming feed to either be public or private, Iminta takes that a step further by allowing you to create groups, exposing only the feeds you want to each group.
[Update: John McCrea, VP of Marketing at Plaxo, writes in to point out that Pulse does offer ways to control who sees what, including the ability to "categorize each connection you make as family, friend, or business." Plaxo also offers private, moderated, and public groups.]
For instance if you have colleagues at work who like to follow you on Twitter and Digg, but you don't want them to see your Flickr photos, just create a group called “work” and drop the Twitter and Digg feeds into it and you're all set. Even though Iminta is still collecting your Flickr feed the “work” group will never see those posts.
Obviously the opposite works as well, if you want to share photos with family members, but don't want to bored them to sleep with your tweets, just create a new group and exclude Twitter.
Interacting with your feed through the site you can narrow your view to see just the photos your friends have posted, just Tweets and other categories, or you can narrow by site — i.e. see only what someone has shared through Google Reader or added to Yelp recently.
If you like the idea of aggregating all your activity in one place, but so far haven't been satisfied with the privacy controls from existing services, Iminta is right up your alley.
And although the list of supported services isn't complete, the company plans to expand to include more sites before it launches for the general public.
