Which Aggregator Is for You?
Now that you’ve seen what each social media aggregator can do, you’re probably wondering which you should use. It depends on what you want to get from an aggregator, and how much time you are willing to invest to get those results.
FriendFeed does an excellent job of plugging all of your social output into a centralized river of social updates, but it’s really only as good as your friends’ willingness to adopt it (and creating imaginary friends is just too much work for something that’s supposed to make your life easier).
Streamy’s tabbed dashboard approach provides a nice way to keep track of your various social media sites, but it falls short of truly bringing all of them together under one roof.
Since most of your online social activity takes place in a Web browser, Flock’s complete integration of a browser and social sites is impressive--but it requires you to jump feet first into an entirely new browser, something that you may not be willing to do (browsers have become almost as personal a choice as operating systems these days).
Ultimately, it’s a toss-up between Flock and FriendFeed.
If Flock’s People sidebar were available as a separate, stand-alone download (à la the popular Facebook and Twitter tool, TweetDeck), it would show all kinds of potential. In contrast, FriendFeed is awesome as is, but its usefulness is determined by breadth of adoption (or lack thereof), and convincing your friends that it’s time to sign up for yet another social portal is easier said than done.
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