The Last Podcast

Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

How much aggregation is too much aggregation?

Posted by Frederic On March - 3 - 2008

<rant>

I don’t use a lot of social networking kind of tools. I never got into Facebook or the horror that is MySpace and I’m not on LinkedIn; but this year, I really started picking up a Twitter habit and for the last couple of weeks, this has been complimented by a Friendfeed habit as well.

And that’s where I have started going slightly nuts.

At any given moment, somebody might comment on a twitter post in Friendfeed; or somebody might send me a message in Twitter to check my email; or a discussion on a blog post might be going on in the blog, Friendfeed and Twitter at the same time; I might comment on somebody’s tweet in Friendfeed, only to get a response in Twitter or per email; and now some of the Shared Feed aggregators are adding comments as well. Oh, and lets not forget that people might also be commenting on a blog post on Assetbar… or there might be people subscribing to your feed in Google Reader, share it on FriendFeed, which leads others to discuss the post there, and maybe also to comment about it in Assetbar, which might sooner or later get an RSS feed that somebody could import into Google Reader and then…….

Maybe I’m not actually supposed to really keep up with all this stuff, but it’s slowly starting to eat away more and more of my attention.

Somebody please write the ‘Grand Aggregator,’ - and please make it do nothing else but aggregate stuff - if there is a comment feature, I won’t sign up.

</rant>

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7 Comments

  1. Louis Gray says:

    It’s too early for this to happen in my opinion. There are a lot of great ideas, and those with the best feature/UI/publicity combo will win. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface, and it’s getting fun out there. :-)

  2. Daryl Tay says:

    given that the social aggregators have only just started popping up, I think it will be awhile before the “grand aggregator” is up! But I’ll be eagerly awaiting that day, but comments would be a must!

  3. I couldn’t agree more, Frederic. I ranted about this last week, calling for a reverse approach to all this aggregation, blasting content out rather than swallowing it inward from an ever-increasing firehose. http://tinyurl.com/2so9mz

  4. Harrison says:

    You should really try Spokeo: http://www.spokeo.com It’s an aggregator that does exactly what you are seeking for - only reading and nothing else.

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About Me

My name is Frederic. I am a PhD student and have been writing about technology on this blog for about the last three years. The focus of this blog is on Web 2.0, blogging, social media, and news aggregation.

These days, you can find most of my professional writing on ReadWriteWeb.

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