Trackle Yourself To Death
Get ready to open a grand can of worms with Trackle.com (now in beta). You haven’t experienced information overload until you’ve visited their site and started receiving updates from their free subscription services.
Pavan Nigam, CEO and Founder of Trackle, has already proven that he can ramp up and rake in millions of new project revenue. His most recent venture, Cendura, was sold to major software vendor, Computer Associates, for [what we're sure was a hefty] undisclosed amount. And this is the guy who gave us the mega-health site, WebMD — part of a monster e-health company that Pavan’s bio on Trackle [says] is on its way to a billion dollars in revenue.
So will Trackle be Pavan’s next successful monster start-up? With his experienced serial entrepreneurship behind the eight ball, the chips are likely stacked in Trackle’s favor. But an interactive look into Trackle may say otherwise.
It seems taboo to say Web 2.0 nowadays, but like it or not, Trackle is the Web 2.0 application that redefines the word TRACK. With customizable subscriptions (known as ‘Tracklets’) on everything from local crime to grocery store sales and Facebook notifications to LinkedIn network updates, Tracklets aggregate your life into one [somewhat] customizable subscription list. And you can dish your Tracklets off to Twitter as Tweets.
But is Trackle just too much data?
Trackle can be configured to notify you with daily Tracklet wrap-ups of your subscriptions, but at what cost? For the news headlines section of my Tracklet wrap-up alone, I was slammed with having to scroll through about 300+ lines of text. Too much. But on the flip side of the coin — I was happy to receive updates on my name as Trackle finds it showing up across the web. (Scary – You could run a Tracklet on someone else.)
Tracklets are even available for finance, employment opportunities, music, movies, health, and even craigslist classifieds — so what would hold anyone back from Trackling their life on Trackle?
Do we really need more information inundation? Or, are Tracklings just what the WebMD ordered?
I think you managed to find the one tracking service which I have yet to sign-up for!
Yeah you know, I was just sitting here thinking that what I needed most in my empty life right now is another tracking/social service to sign up for. Maybe I could finally find a friend there. YEAH!
Then, as I tried to comment, I realized that I couldn't remember my login credentials. Oh woe was I.
So, what I really need is a service that will track all of my other services' login info. I'm so confused and out of control. Somebody please help me.
Social networking is chaos[period] It's like trying to find a restaurant in Tokyo — there's thousands of them, but you don't know which one tastes best without trying.
Not sure I would trust any single service to keep track of all my logins for the various other services. Compromise that one login and the rest of your online identities are compromised. Bad juju methinks!
But outside of that, you gotta at least signup and try the services before passing judgement. Some may sound useful and turn out to be nothing special. Others work the opposite. All in all, as Rich said – social networking is chaos and you have to learn how to properly wield the chaos to make it turn out a useful product for you.