Speaking of Aggregates: There's More!

The world of aggregates continues to grow, and not surprisingly it keeps getting better! The idea of aggregates has not caught on in mainstream social networking communities yet, so there is still time for other competitors to enter the marketplace and compete for the top spot.

One of the new guys on the block, Tabber is quite sophisticated in both its layout and content design. An online address book, Tabber integrates other features as well that allow you to keep track of what your friends are doing online--whether it be updating their MySpace profile, adding new photos, or digging a news story. In order to get friends content online, Tabber allows users to import contact information from a variety of social networks and other sources such as AIM, Yahoo!, and Hotmail to name a few. It's a nice service that integrates and updates information more effectively than other sites. As Mashable describes, the update service is a lot like the news feed you find on the social networking website, Facebook.


Another aggregator just launched for download looks really intriguing as well. This alternative is called 8hands. Basically, it is AIM for social networking. It integrates all your content and contacts into a desktop application that looks a lot like Instant Messenger. From this, you can open additional windows to view content more fully. 8hands allows you to keep track of your top 8 friends (which it determines through those that "interact" most with you), along with your friends that are most active on your social networks. Right now 8hands supports MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr among others. However, it is in the process of integrating other networks and features as well. I feel like once this site is fully developed it will be one of the best available. I wanted to try it out for myself, but unfortunately it is so new that they do not have a Mac version yet, though they claim it is in production.


It's interesting to watch the growth of this segment of social networking. I think within a year we will begin to see aggregators emerge as key players in web 2.0. Until then, let the competition continue!