On Cliqset

In the process of a vanity search, I saw the Louis Gray (who apparently conducted his own vanity search) used Cliqset to bookmark one of my blog posts. I hadn't heard of Cliqset, so I decided to investigate, beginning with Gray's blog. While Gray mentioned the service in a March 2010 post, he said more in a January 4 post:

Today, Cliqset, which is chomping on the heels of FriendFeed in the features department, if not the activity department just yet, added several new capabilities that make the site very compelling - including my personal favorite, highly customizable streams by service and individual.

Gray's summation of the company's focus:

The company is focused on become a highly functional swiss army knife for Web service updates from around the Web, and now, native on the site.

And Gray isn't the only one to compare Cliqset to that other service. Emily of Uhhmm News made the same comparison:

The question is will it grow pass were Friendfeed was at one point or will it get bought out by some large company....

Emily then said:

If Cliqset gets past where Friendfeed was during its glory days I think it will become a giant website. If it is bought out before then it will fall to the ground as Friendfeed has.

While compete.com shows a major spike in Cliqset's usage since January, it still has a way to go to get to FriendFeed's usage levels. While this could certainly happen, what is the compelling reason for people to set up a separate Cliqset account?

And you do have to sign up. Unlike sites such as Brazen Careerist which support credentials from other services (in this case Facebook Connect), Cliqset apparently requires that you set up your own account. Even when clicked the button to indicate that I was a Google user, I was still asked to define a user name and password. Since I'm personally on service overload at this point, I passed on the opportunity.

If you want to check out people who are more determined (or less lazy) than I am, then check out Louis Gray's Cliqset feed, Kol Tregaskes' Cliqset feed, and Cliqset founder Darren Bounds' feed.