Plaxo Pulse and social network aggregators

Is anyone else tired of the email carpet bombing from Plaxo? The latest rage is Pulse, a new social network service. My email inbox started getting bombed with invitations last night. Here is how Plaxo describes it...

What's pulse?

Pulse is a new sharing service from Plaxo. Pulse is the easiest way to share photos, recommendations, links, videos, bookmarks, comments - or just about anything - with your friends, family, or business network. Have you checked your Pulse?

Hmm...I already have Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, and even the regular Plaxo for contacts. Is Pulse for the neophytes that don't already use one of the many existing social networks?

Social Network Aggregators - For all of you at the other end of the spectrum, the ones that have joined just about every social network, there are now Social Network Aggregators. These services combine all your social network content in one place so you, and others, can view your blog posts, comments, pictures, Twitters, Facebook entries, etc. Many of these services also allow you to "enter once" and post everywhere, saving you the trouble of posting the same content to multiple social sites. Here are some of the services you might want to check out.

FriendFeed - FriendFeed is the latest creation from four former Google guys, including Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail. Here is the description from Friend Feed. With FriendFeed, you list the people you want to keep in touch with. They let us know what services they use (e.g., Flickr or Facebook or Picasa Web Albums), and you get a personalized feed of what they are up to. So, if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. You don't need to install anything to use FriendFeed — our crawling technology automatically picks up all the stuff you do on the web sites you already use with no additional effort on your part.

Spokeo - Steve O'Hear at ZDnet reviewed Spokeo and described it as "a social network aggregator which presents each user with an updated view of all of their friends' activities on sites such as MySpace, Digg, Flickr and YouTube. In fact Spokeo has support for over 20 of the most popular social networks, as well any site that provides an RSS feed."

ProfileLinker - Mike Arrington at TechCrunch reviewed ProfileLinker and says "You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks."

Soup.io - Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch did a review of Soup.io. TechCrunch describes it this way "Without needing to sign up, you can easily combine feeds from services like: Flickr, Digg, LiveJournal, Delicious, eBay, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vox, YouTube, Zoomr, or any other RSS feed. Soup.io also has a bookmarklet that lets users easily add content to their feed from around the web, turning it into kind of a tumble blog"

Here is a list of 30 more from TheFattyTalks blog. It is just a list with links..no descriptions, but it does give you a feel for how many of these things are out there.

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Comments

[John McCrea]

Actually, Pulse is great for both neophytes and Web 2.0 power users. I am connected to lots of journalists, bloggers, and VCs in Pulse, and get the stream of stuff from what they are doing on Twitter, Jaiku, Yelp, Flickr, their blogs, Last.fm, etc. And that river of content is searchable. I also use it to selectively share some content with my family, other stuff with my friends, and other stuff with my business network.

[Shaun Dakin]

Yeap.. I started getting a ton of emails from Pulse yesterday and had to modify my settings (that were all opt in) to opt out of all notifications as it was out of control.

Shaun Dakin
http://www.StopPoliticalCalls.org

[ptamaro]

Thanks for another great post. I've been looking for a good aggregation tool as you describe it...

I've been trying to dub and define the need and functionality, but the best I can come up with so far is "social content management" as a term. I guess a basic description could be, "the management of a person's online assets, online identity, properties, web-based tools, web sites, widgets, resources, and similar stuff."