It’s rare that we write about two similar services within a such short timeframe, but it seems like yesterday’s review of FriendFeed wasn’t enough to satisfy the all-services-into-one market. Iminta is a new service founded by an CNET employee which aims to make it easy for you and your pals to see what the other is “inta.”
The way the service works, much like FriendFeed, is that you feed it your usernames of various services (Digg, YouTube, Twitter, and the major culprits are all present.) After you’ve done that, using their surprisingly intuitive and neat user interface, Iminta “syncronizes” your “inta”’s with the corresponding service. For example, all your favourites from YouTube, diggs from Digg, tweets from Twitter, and scrobbles from Last.fm, are all imported.
Once you’re done syncronizing the web services, you can go ahead and invite/add your friends and pals into the service. And judging from the social aspect of the service, trust me: you’ll need ‘em. After this, Iminta consists of three basic tabs: “Recent comments”, “What your pals are inta,” and “what you’re inta.” As if they’re not self-explanatory enough, recent comments displays comments on your intas, the second tab displays a flowing feed of your pal’s recent intas, and the latter a list of your own intas.
So far, the service just seems like a FriendFeed with a better UI, but here’s where it starts to differentiate a little. A neat thing about Iminta is that it lets you drill down to you and your friends’ intas. You can filter by types, such as friends, microblogs, music artists, and photos, or site, like Digg, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr. Not only that, but you can post new intas using the service itself, optionally including a URL, title, and description.
If there’s one thing that’s clear from Iminta and FriendFeed, it’s that there is an overwhelming number of services on the web for users to keep track of. Both services look to unify the experience and use them as a base-point for checking you and your friends’ recent activities. You’ll still, of course, use the services enlisted (that’s the whole point!) but they fill a great niche of an all-in-one experience. Personally, I’m a fan of FriendFeed due to its simplicity, though after using it, Iminta has started grow on me with its unique and different user interface. Another recommended try for service geeks.
