Today I got my invite to try out minggl.com. First, a brief description from their own site: “MiNGGL is a free, simple, and easy-to-use browser plugin that helps you connect with friends and manage your profile, whether you’re a member of one or multiple social networking sites. With the MiNGGL Social Palette, your friends and favorite social spots will be connected into a larger network that you control.”
Sounds good, right? Aggregators are becoming popular nowadays, which is the natural step in the world of post-myspace and post-facebook startups that hope to claim a piece of the socnetverse.^[1] Minggl’s potential uniqueness in this paradigm is that it does not simply aggregate data using rss, opml or api on their own site - instead they provide a browser toolbar / plugin that allows their own Minggl notes to be added directly to the site in question (so far myspace and facebook). A little note shows up in the white-space surrounding the facebook / myspace profile that sums up your relationship to the person, and if the person also happens to be a minggl user, more of these floating boxes will appear throughout the profile, nicely embedded wherever the user decided to add one of these notes.
But instead of talking, let me show you what I mean. The setup process is a breeze - in my case I used FireFox 2.0. The toolbar installed just like a standard plugin would (although at 600 kb+ it is rather large for FireFox). After the installation, this is the page you see:

On top of that, a new toolbar appears:

The toolbar is not extremely intuitive, but that’s where the 7-screen-long ‘Getting Started’ page comes in handy. It might feel and look a bit frightening, but Minggl has a bit of a learning curve to it, and my advice is that you at least skim over those pages as it will make things easier. One thing I don’t like about the toolbar is that it takes up my valuable browser real-estate. I mean, it’s only got 300-400px worth of icons - the rest of the toolbar, in my case some 800px is full of ugly grey space. And my vertical browser-space gets reduced by 20px or so… I’d much rather have them do what del.icio.us did - provide a menu AND a toolbar. In my case I disabled the toolbar and use the menu and the shortcut to the ‘Tag this’ command. This should be really easy from a development perspective….

Minggl in action

This is definitely the nice part because minggl is very unobtrusive. When you browse regular sites, it just sits in the background and does nothing. There’s no noticeable speed degradation to FireFox and the memory imprint is not too big (though this may change as more profiles get added eventually). However, upon arriving at a myspace or facebook profile, a new block of text pops into existence:

which after a few seconds changes to

It usually sits next to the actual profile being viewed and is totally out of your way. It’s neither distracting nor obtrusive. Even the advertisement embedded into the textbox is very discreet (facebook, digg, time dot coms - watch and learn). Similarly, clicking on the ‘Add to Multi-site…’ button (Hal, please change this caption to something that sounds human) produces a lightbox-type popup (css+java driven, quasi-modal box that fades the rest of the page).

You get to add a few tags if you want, and that’s it - a few seconds later the person’s added to your “multi-site network”. Again, this is really quite well done and should become a second nature to someone using minggl after only a few tries.

However, there are a few problems with this setup. In my particular setup (FireFox 2.0 on Win XP SP2 Pro) Minggle produced an error twice when loading up on facebook.com:

and although the errors were not critical, they do merit some further debugging. The third time (while typing up this entry the first time, grrr) it crashed FireFox when trying to bring up a Facebook profile in a separate tab. Now, this product is at a private beta stage at this point, so I’m simply pointing out these issues and classifying them under quirks-to-be-worked-out category instead of crying havoc - and I’ve already notified Minggl of these problems.

Another problem lies in the presentation / algorithm of the ‘Add Contact’ popup (I refuse to use their caption) - the colors on the page are not always very visible because of the low contrast ratio between white and the shades of pink and blue that they use. Also, the ‘recommended tags’ portion seems almost arbitrary, whereas it should be context-driven by say, a combination of words, interests and activities present within the viewed profile. I was looking at a random facebook profile earlier on and got this:

Tags such as ‘accessible’, ‘momesticated’, etc., not only bear no relevance to the profile, but they are generally not very popular insofar as search terms are concerned. So why display something like that?

Adding a profile

Ideally, minggl is supposed to eventually provide a link between several social networks. When I’ve spoken with the COO, Dave Evans, earlier on this evening, he claimed that their eventual purpose is to provide an API that would allow both large and small social networks to be tied into each other. Whether or not that will work remains to be seen - it’s both a factor of the buzz that can be generated around this venture and its actual functionality. For now, we’re limited to testing MySpace and Facebook, and I’ll focus on Facebook.

Unfortunately, so far I have been unable to attach my Facebook profile. Every single time I try to input my FB e-mail + password combination, I get an error - and I’ve tried to do this using two different accounts, using computers in three countries and mutiple e-mail addresses - all of which work on Facebook - all to no avail. Also, the new profile page has two shortcomings - the password field is in plain-text (update: fixed by minggl after I’ve reported it) and the field asks for a Facebook username, where it should be asking for an e-mail address - this is rather confusing. Here’s an example of what I’m referring to:

Now, I have tried to look up this problem in the help section of the website, but it’s not very helpful at all because it tells me to refer to the flawed instructions on the page above:

Further considerations

One other interesting aspect of minggl suggested by Dave was that it will allow its users to leave notes that other trusted minggl users will be able to see - but not native socnet users. This plays on a potentially cool idea of subvertive secrecy and/or a type of elitism and might help attract more supporters of this site by way of taunting, especially among younger MySpace users - “if you’re minggling you’ll see what I wrote - if not, too bad for you…” It could also prove to be a useful feature among other users, if it can be enabled on a single-user level - say, enabling different minggl content on my Facebook profile for my girlfriend, different for my friends, and yet different for my co-workers.

Customizing minggl at this stage is limited to four colors only - I believe that it should be customizable to a much higher extent (font size at least) and using a color wheel or swatches as opposed to a text input using the color’s hexadecimal value:

Anyway, as soon as I can enable my FB profile in minggl I will continue to evaluate this further. For now I’m not giving up on the site as it seems to have some serious potential and if they continue to work out the bugs and add further functionality it might attract some serious interest. Expect a part 2 in a day or two….

1. ↑1 socnet (pronounced sock-net) is my own term referring to SOCial NETworking sites in general (as noun) or the practice of participating in them (as verb) [socnetting, socnetted]. Socnetverse is a derived meta-term referring to the network and the phenomenon of socnetting.