YouBundle. You Serious?

YouBundle, a new social sharing site launched at CES i-Stage today, promising the “first social powered meta results for any subject imaginable.”

The site works around topics, with users adding links and content under any topic they like. Content may include embedded videos of baby seals being clubbed for example, or just links to a webpage. The experience is geared to making it easy for anyone to create “Bundles” and in terms of layout, although it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing site, they’ve thought it through fairly well.

One interesting addition is the ability to take Bundles off site through widgets, allowing users to create shared content and take it anywhere.

As a standalone product it has potential; these sorts of sites can and do find dedicated audiences, but here’s where I do take umbrage: the rhetoric behind the service doesn’t deliver on site.

The front page starts with these fine PR words “YouBundle is the Next generation of Search and Collaboration on the Internet.” Um…no it’s not.

This is not a new idea. This is Hubpages or Squidoo with widgets thrown in for good measure. This is a social bookmarking site like Delicious, but made more complicated. This is Mahalo, but not implemented as nicely.

There is nothing remarkably ground breaking about YouBundle.

Doriano Carta at Mashable writes that the ability to mix content “truly is amazing” and that

Is their service offering anything new? I think the answer is yes thanks to the ability to share these bundles or streams through widgets and RSS feeds.

As we noted above, adding a widget may be a point of differentiation vs Squidoo or HubPages, but widgets and/ or with RSS streams ARE NOT NEW. This is not new, period.

I don’t want to be too hard on this company; content/ search plays of this nature have a reasonable track record of building an audience, and there is absolutely no reason why these guys won’t go well, but seriously, I thought we were over this PR BS hype….obviously not.

Video demo below. Content warning: includes unsubstantiated hype