With today’s Web being more social and average Web users having more than one account in several of these sites, be it MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg or YouTube, it is becoming increasingly cumbersome to manage each account individually. A new wave of social aggregation services aims to make our online social lives a little easier by displaying information from each social networking site in a single location--where one can keep track of every inane action of their friends through feeds. Today there are dozens of social aggregation services including FriendFeed, Spokeo, Iminta, Dandelife, and SocialThing! among other start-ups.

FriendFeed allows users to aggregate information and activity streams from various services on the Internet--Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, Delicious bookmarks, Last.fm, Twitter messages, etc. (a total of 33 services). Basically it keeps you updated on what your friends or family are sharing, uploading, linking or commenting on--listing it in an RSS feed format. The site recently launched a search feature where users can search by individual, friends or all users as well as narrow the search to specific services like Twitter or YouTube. Similarly, Spokeo is a RSS reader of all your friends’ activities. While FriendFeed requires that you add which friends you want to track, Spokeo will find all your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail and then go out to 30 or so sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book.

Apart from merely being a blog reader of your friend’s activities, Socialthing! (in beta) allows you to send data back to social services (e.g. respond to your friend’s Tweeter messages directly on the site). Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. Other services in this space include Mugshot, SecondBrain and Dandelife, among others. As more social sites open up their APIs and become more tolerant to third party sites, the benefits of data portability can be truly realized--giving users more control to share or move data from one system to another.