As we heard last fall, Cliqset, a FriendFeed like social aggregation platform, was shut down by its founders, Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen. Cliqset, which launched in 2009, was a high-powered social syndication and aggregation service, with the ability to post and syndicate content on Cliqset, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and 80 other sites and networks. You can read our prior coverage of Cliqset here. As Louis Gray wrote last November, the startup was one of the first networks to implement Pubsubhubbub for real-time updates, and Salmon for cross-network comment posting. But despite these technologies, the service couldn’t attract an active number of users and landed in the deadpool. It looks like Bounds is on to his next project—Glow.
Bounds writes that Glow is his “personal attempt at building a social network that doesn’t sacrifice simplicity, features or user-experience in an effort to promote decentralization, user privacy and data ownership.” The site, which is in stealth mode for now, will combine personal publishing ans social conversation.
Glow sill use many of the same open protocols and standards that Cliqset implemented, including Activity Streams, Salmon, PubSubHubbub and Portable Contacts. Bounds says that he is taking a different approach to social networking that Diaspora, OneSocialWeb or Status.net. From his post, “Feature wise it’s a little of Twitter, a little of Facebook and few of my own ideas. Think real-time, follow-model, @mentions, likes, comments and private group messaging to start.”
Interestingly, Bounds says that he doesn’t plan to build a business around Glow.
Bounds told Gray back in November that any future projects would projects would leverage users’ existing social graphs and that “the need for success wouldn’t be contingent on relationships and community within itself.” Perhaps that could indicate that Glow is built around your social graph on Facebook and Twitter.
It should be interesting to see what Bounds has up his leave with Glow. Thankfully we won’t have to wait too long. He says he’s rolling out the first set of invitations to Glow in the next two weeks.