Social Aggregators – So many to choose from!

In January I was busy playing away with the private beta, Lifestrea.ms. Although a great concept, it is a mighty quirky site. In fact, I still haven’t figured it out! So, I have searched a bit more at the different aggregators out there, some are in beta, some have become recently released, and some can just be used as an aggregator but probably aren’t meant to be!!

Jaiku is currently still in invite beta only. I just checked and I have 10 invites available if anyone is interested. Jaiku is an aggregator that is also a bit Twitter-like and has groups that you can join. The groups look like they could be a great thing that sets Jaiku apart, but from the ones that I had interest in, all that the group consists of is a place where a bunch of people can sign up for an RSS feed of whatever the group creator has chosen. Yes, you can talk within the group, but it was not that common in the areas I was interested in. I even noticed that group creators seemed to have ‘spammed’ the good ideas of what could be groups by including their irrelevant RSS feeds for the members to receive.

Tumblr isn’t really a social site aggregator, but can be used as one. From what I’ve seen, I believe that Tumblr is supposed to be like a blogging platform, but you can plug in up to 5 different feeds (without having to bend over backwards for the Tumblr Gods). For blogging, there is no place to leave comments, so this is good if you just want people to be able to follow whatever topic you are covering. Of course, my topic is me! 🙂

And the last one I will talk about today is FriendFeed which has recently come out of beta and is my favorite social feed aggregator at this time. (You know a woman always has the right to change her mind later! 😉 ) Among the many different reasons to love FriendFeed is that you can add feeds directly from 27 different sites, plus your own RSS feeds from your blogs. You can go through and add friends the old fashioned way, or, if you are unable to find your friend in FriendFeed, you can make an imaginary account where you can add the feeds you want to track. You can add your imaginary friend’s Digg account, Twitter account, and many others and feel as though they are right there with you! This is so you can still keep up without having to send out yet another invitation to your friends who are probably close to having you committed for joining all of these crazy sites! 🙂 Another neat function of FriendFeed is that you can ‘Like’ a Tweet, Digg, or post of other users on FriendFeed. You can also leave comments on the various posts. You don’t have to be friends with someone to like what they posted or to leave a comment about it. This is truly a social site for social networking.

I know there are several other aggregators out there…. I’d love to hear which ones you like!

Playing with Lifestrea.ms

For those of you who may not have heard, Lifestrea.ms launched in private beta November 14, 2007.  The premise behind this site is simply brilliant!  A site that brings together all most some of the more popular social networking sites. (Many upgrades are in the works, and the site is still in private beta, so I should give ’em a bit of a break!) Thomas Huhn, the founder of Lifestrea.ms even realized that many of us may have different online identities and different social groups and we may never want any one group to know absolutely everything there is to know! 

From Lifestrea.ms:

To put it in prose: lifestrea.ms brings together all kinds of things that you and your social network create on the web in one place. There you decide who sees what. You can share and re-publish your contents and even add additional texts and media from your lifestrea.ms dashboard. To make sharing your life easier, lifestrea.ms breaks down your social life into seven of the most important parts: public, family, friends, local, professional, romantic and secret. You have one fully adjustable profile for each of your networks. The same way you share your life with others, your network contacts share their life with you. To keep you in the loop, you can even read your newsfeeds (’cause these are written by people you follow) and your emails (’cause these are people that contact you) from inside your dashboard. Staying on top of what’s going on has never been more effortless, so come and join today and start communicating with all your friends, family and colleagues in a new way.

As I mentioned, I think this is a wonderful idea for a site.  I have played with it some today (although I had been a member for over a month) and although it does seem to be a bit quirky and frustrating at times, I can confirm that it does at least allow you to Tweet rather than logging into Twitter to give an update.  OK, my most frustrating point was with the bookmarklet to add a new feed or bookmark.  There is no way I have found to change the feed or bookmark from private to public or partially public.  This issue has already been brought up in the feedback collection being made.

So now what?  Lifestrea.ms is in private beta and you wanna join?  Leave a comment or drop me an email and I will gladly invite you to join me on Lifestrea.ms!  🙂