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: