Back in March I briefly mentioned a MyBlogLog-like online community called Explode. I signed up for the service to give it a try but ultimately ended up not using it for much of anything. So when I got an email early this morning announcing the relaunch of Explode, I was just a tad lost. For one, I couldn’t remember exactly what it was! But here’s the important part of the email announcing the new and improved Explode:

At its heart, the new Explode is a social search engine. Say you’re interested in web developers who know PHP; type those interests in, or heir names, and you can see their latest content, and find the people they list as friends. One more click and you can find people across the web who have similar interests.

Log in, however, and you’ll discover what could become the world’s largest social network. It doesn’t matter where on the web you choose to host your profile: it might be a site like Flickr or Twitter, a blog host like Wordpress.com or Typepad, or it might be a website or blog you host yourself. You can register your presence in Explode, and then add anyone to your friends, no matter which site they choose to host their profile on.

The Social Search Engine

If the heart of the new Explode is a social search engine, that’s the first thing I want to check out.

There’s a drop-down menu next to the main search bar on the site that lets you choose between “Interests” and “People”. Let’s say you want to find people with similar interests. I decided to try “psychology” to see what I could come up with. The result of my search was a long list of user profiles that pointed to a wide variety of external profiles on other sites (YouTube, LiveJournal, etc).

Two views are available: list and tiles. List view is the default and shows you search results in the form a picture, lists of interests or tags, and a set of links to tools on the site. From here, you can view each person’s friends, other Explode users who are similar, a user’s comment wall (which is similar to the comment wall on Facebook, MBL, etc), and that user’s “latest content”.

The “latest content” link attempts to use the feed associated with whatever site a user has added to their profile. For example, if you link your WordPress blog to your Explode profile, the latest content option will pull your most recent posts and display links back to your site right inside the search results.

Tile view switches the output of your search to display just the image from user’s profiles. Hovering over a picture will give you a menu with some of the same options available in the list view.

Regardless of the view, the search results point you to that person’s profile on whatever third-party site they’re using, be it LiveJournal, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. The full list of supported services includes Explode, LiveJournal, Vox, DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, Tribe, Flickr, YouTube, 43 Things, Twitter, and EduSpaces. You can also register just about any external site like hosted or standalone WordPress blogs, websites, etc.

But let’s say you want to search for a specific person. Changing the drop-down menu from “Interests” to “People” yields the same type of results but, obviously, searches for the name you’ve entered as opposed to interests. I noticed that the drop-down always goes back to “interests”, even if you’ve just done a people search. I’d recommend changing that functionality to remember what folks have searched for.

Profiles and Social Networking

The big thing Explode is pushing are its social networking features. You can link up with friends, find new friends based on similar interests, and use the MBL-like widget to socialize your blog or website. To take advantage of the social features you must sign in to the service.

Luckily, signing in can be done with either an Explode username and password or through one of the supported sign-in services: OpenID, AIM, LiveJournal, Vox, Verisign PIP, WordPress.com, or Typekey. Explode will create an account for you on the fly if you’ve already got an account on one of these services.

I’m glad they’ve made that process easy because, frankly… the social networking features of the site aren’t anything new or different. You can build networks of friends, nudge them (which I assume is like poking people on Facebook), and leave comments on their walls. But you can do all of that at any other social network.

And while Explode lets you find people regardless of their network, there is no interplay between networks… so you’ll still have to keep all of your existing social network accounts. You can’t, for example, comment on someone’s Facebook wall or MySpace profile. To my knowledge, this isn’t possible anywhere. But Explode makes it sound like they’re offering a hub for all of your social networks… which is not the case.

The search engine is by far the most valuable feature of the new Explode. The remaining social networking features will just add another profile for people to have to maintain on yet another social network. But I found the service to be useful enough at finding people to go ahead and bookmark it for future reference. And fans of widgets will love the ability to embed their profile into their website.

So while it’s not the social networking hub that I was thinking it would be, it did turn out to be a decent social search engine.