Nsyght is a web application for Twitter and Facebook that lets you search information from your friends in real time, post directly to your networks as well as search and filter your own “personal fire hose” of information.

You might remember Nsyght as a bookmark based search engine from when I wrote about it back in 2008. It was down for some time and is now reborn as a web client that allows you to aggregate, share, and search your social graph in real time.

How does it work?

If, like me, you belong to a large number of social networks and sometimes struggle to keep up with all the info, Nsyght collects, organizes, filters and searches information from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Last.fm, and Delicious. It is not meant to replace social networks, but to enhance them.

You don’t need to re-friend people on Nsyght. (If you are the kind of person who knows what it means, you might like to know that it uses the APIs of the services to channel your comments and conversations between Nsyght and the other services you use.) The effect is that Nsyght acts as a kind of social dashboard that organizes and displays discussions around content to and from the original sources so you can see it all in one place.

You don’t have to sign up to use Nsyght, you can login with your Twitter or Facebook account.

What does it do?

Nsyght is a powerful tool. Here are some of the things it lets you do:

• Easily retweet or share things you find with your friends on other social services
• Updates appear and are posted in real time
• View videos and images inline
• Be notified via email when someone replies to you, even if the reply came from twitter
• Keep track of discussions among your friends and see the replies in threaded form

Powerful search

For Pandia’s readers, the search related aspects of Nsyght are probably of particular interest. Nsyght brings a lot of information from a lot of sources together in one place and what makes this a user friendly tool and not just too much information is search.

And there are some real search benefits here. First of all, you can search across all the services you use in real time, i.e. fresh info, updated in real time, from all of your friends across multiple social networks. You can filter by user, type (video, photo, discussion, news, audio), service, tag, keyword, and even all of the above.

You can also search for information from a single a user, or even your own posts. This can be convenient if you are looking for a link you know you posted to someone, but you just can’t remember when you posted it and on which network.

Nsyght lets you view and filter what they call your personal fire hose: See all the info from all of your friends in all of your networks, then filter to see just videos, photos, discussions, music, or even news posted by your friends. A pretty powerful tool.

Lastly, on Nsyght, related posts are displayed as discussions in threaded form. These discussions are searchable by keyword or topic.

Brand new features

Nsyght got new funding in December and this has vitalized the development and the team keeps adding new features. The most recent additions include follow support. This gives you the ability to not only follow someone from Nsyght, but chose which services you see from that user.

Now you also can “like” things you find on Nsyght (e.g. adding a thumbs up on Facebook or a star on Twitter) and chose to syndicate this to Facebook or Twitter in a variety of ways.

Another new feature is Boxee support. Boxee http://www.boxee.tv/ is an application for your TV that allows you to watch net videos on your TV. On Nsyght it allows you to watch videos posted by your friends on your TV.

In their own words

We had a talk with Geoffrey McCaleb, CEO of Nsyght and he uses this metaphor to explain his efforts:

- We’ve admittedly come to the realtime aggregation party a bit late. All the beer is gone, and a lot of our competition is already passed out in the corner. But we believe pretty strongly that the problem is still there. Social data is exploding at an exponential rate, but while Google and Bing do a great job in indexing the entire fire hose in real time, it still doesn’t help you discover things from your own circle of trust. Relevancy is still very much driven by familiarity, and who are you more familiar with than people you know?

Google recently launched its own social network effort, Buzz. What does McCaleb think of competition from the giant of search?

- We don’t see Buzz as competition but as yet another service to partner with. Buzz has an amazing install base to build upon, but fundamentally I don’t think Buzz is looking to solve the same problems that we are. So look for Nsyght to offer Buzz as an option in the not so distant future.

And what does the future hold for Nsyght? McCaleb explains:

- Our primary goal is to allow people to weave their extended graphs from all the services they use together, so if in the future there is some hot new social network that becomes popular, they won’t have to make that awkward “should I stay or should I go” decision, the kind of tipping point that happened when everyone realized their friends were “giving up” their MySpace accounts. With nsyght, you can have the best of both worlds.