A Russian startup, LikeHack.com, has launched a new app which allows for personal content curating, filtering feeds, and to acts as a personal search engine of sorts. According to the developers, LifeHack will save social types in excess of an hour every day.
Editor’s note: This post was altered via suggestion by the CEO of the service. A reference to “boys” at post end was changed to read; “boys and girls”.
LikeHack signup leads to an almost instant new feed rendering.
According to the press from the startup, the team behind the service analyzed some three million social accounts to derive solutions to the now age old social media time management ailments we all suffer from. We decided to do a brief review of this new social feed aggregator’s worth. Here goes.
The Good
Signup for LikeHack is pretty unpretentious and quick. As you can see in the screen above, a few clicks on the various buttons and my social and blog reading choices have been collected. I also added the LikeHack Chrome extension to test it too. The second screen below shows this as I type here in WordPress. What’s impressive for me so far is that my most recent Facebook moves have been snatched for further categorization. While this is not rocket science exactly, I am testing several other tools that are not this instantaneous, so……
The LikeHack Chrome tool at upper right. This add was flawlessly simple too.
Then I added feeds for Richard Edelman’s 6 AM blog, Brian Solis, Chris Abraham’s Huff Po blog, to force news from my preferred reading list to the LikeHack system – and here I was let down. Either I held my mouth wrong or had the wrong expectation. The news feeds were all mixed up and not one of the sites I took the time to enter an RSS for showed. And here’s the thing, any system that asks a user to add an RSS needs to understand such operations as forced demand. What I mean is, if I took the time, it needs to be prioritized above V3 Integrated Marketing and renewable-energy-news (Did I even ask to see those?)
Okay, maybe that’s not so fair. Maybe the recommendation aspect kicked into high gear and assumed I am some marketing whiz? Moving on.
The Bad
Okay, all done. Aside the utility of being able to share all my Facebook “liked” stuff on several networks (which I can do from Hootsuite or), a loosely organized aggregation-suggestion system is not so impressive. Privatedaytrips.com? The last straw for this test was a search via my super duper personal search tool. I imput my old pal Brian Solis (Mr. Social Media) and to my surprise. Nada. (PS, I searched for Mashable too)
Brian Solis no longer exists.
Dropping Dime
In summing up. This St. Petersberg startup has some potential in a very crowded space. But to quote from their own press release;
“LikeHack does hard work with curating the content from Facebook, Twitter and your favorite blogs.”
Boys and girls, it’s time to work a bit harder. Let me know how I held my mouth wrong in getting my feeds to show, or Brian Solis for that matter? But maybe this old tech dog lost a step. Kate Russell over at the BBC ends up a roundup with LikeHack, leaving all but Feedly and Pulse sucking eggs. There are some other alternatives out there that DO incorporate your feeds.