There’s a scene in one of the old Beverly Hillbillies episodes in which Jethro, their junior Einstein, proudly proclaims “I know my Gazintas.”
“Huh?” was the reponse.
“You know…2 gazinta 6 three times, 4 gazinta 8 two times…”
So I laughed out loud when I read of the debut last week of the new online networking site Iminta.com. Essentially, Iminta is Twitter on steroids, asking the ever-pressing question, “What are you inta?”
In Web 2.0-speak, this is an aggregator of sorts that you control, allowing your friends, family, and other contacts to see as much of you as you want them to see, all in one handy location. When you set up your account (watch the demo video), you specify all of your networking accounts, like MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Flickr, fave YouTube clips, etc. Iminta grabs all those and brings them back into one easy-to-navigate screen.
Better yet is the fact that users can clump their friends, etc., into various permissions groups, so you get to specify what people see. Sure, folks could go nosing around the internet until they found every last trace of you, but Iminta offers the chance to see a snapshot. And you control what is in the picture each group sees.
I suppose I should have seen it coming. The explosion of Web 2.0 sites has made it virtually impossible to handle, and our friends could waste hours trying to keep up with us. What the world needs now is a meta site, or a synoptic, thereby allowing us to “see together.”
Of course, maybe if we didn’t leap every time a new networking site appeared we wouldn’t have so many accounts to keep track of. And maybe what we really need is the Ultimate Networking Site that does everything the others do…kind of like the miracle kitchen cleaner they hawk on late-night infomercials.
And with that, I’m going to grab my Jethro-dized cereal bowl and do my own Gazintas. You know. “Two bowls gazinta one stomach…”
Dr “I’m Inta That” Gerlich
