ReadWriteWeb

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

Last week we introduced you to FriendDeck, a new online application that lets you monitor FriendFeed in a way that's very similar to how the Adobe AIR app, TweetDeck, monitors Twitter. Within FriendDeck's columns, you can track FriendFeed searches, users, friends, lists, rooms, and more.

Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.

Feedly, a magazine style feed reader that syncs with Google Reader, just released a very interesting and useful integration with Mozilla's Ubiquity. Ubiquity gives Firefox a command-line interface that makes tasks like bookmarking a page on delicious, sending a quick message to Twitter, or searching Google and Flickr as easy as typing in a few letters without ever having to use the mouse. Among many other things, feedly's Ubiquity integration now lets you share any Web page on Google Reader and send a tweet with a link through Ubiquity.

GoDaddy has just unveiled an amazing new service called SmartSpace which lets anyone register a domain name and then instantly turn it into a social web site which aggregates any of the following components onto one page: a blog, a photo album, a chat application, email, RSS feeds, and even components from social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn. All you have to do is register the domain name you want and all the technical work is done for you - the site builds itself automatically.

WonderHowTo aggregates and curates a large database of instructional videos from all over the Internet. It employs a number of editors who search the web for good how-to videos and then categorize them into 36 vertical categories. Thanks to this editorial process, the quality of these how-to videos featured on WonderHowTo is surprisingly high and topics range from Spanish pronunciation to surviving nuclear blasts. One of the most interesting features of WonderHowTo is its recently launched 'Related How-To Videos' sidebar for Firefox.

We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but today, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.

Moopz is a new web service created by the fabulous Mark Carey, the same developer responsible for RWW's innovative FriendFeed/comment integration. With Moopz, Carey brings us a conversation-tracking interface for FriendFeed that lets you keep tabs on what's hot, what's recent, as well as what's quiet (dare we saying "upcoming?"). The interface is very similar to FriendFeed - you can interact with the stories by liking and commenting, but the big difference between the two services is that Moopz helps organize and categorize the FriendFeed noise into an easy-to-read flow of news.

There's a new aggregator in town folks. If you're a fan of Dave Winer's political NewsJunk aggregation site, Techmeme, or FriendFeed, then you're going to love Winer's counterpart to the political NewsJunk site, Tech NewsJunk. Created because Winer wasn't getting enough news about products, Tech Newsjunk is the latest product review aggregator to hit the market.

While quite a few mainstream users use RSS daily on their personalized homepages without ever knowing it, more traditional RSS aggregators are only slowly expanding beyond the early adopter crowd. Regator, which released a private beta today, is courting these mainstream users by giving them a very straightforward and easy way to browse RSS feeds while keeping the layout of more traditional RSS aggregators.

News aggregation sites aren't anything new to us. There are sites like Techmeme, Popurls, Techsted, Alltop, and more that get the job done. So when we took a look at Smashing Feeds we weren't all that excited about it, until we discovered something that the other sites don't have: Twitter and FriendFeed link aggregation.

If there's one thing to be learned from social media tools, it's that these services were not made to interact with one another. Complaints are rolling in and heated discussions are taking place about the noise levels within social media platforms. Here's a look at why noise levels are high and why filtering should be the next step for social media platforms.

The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

ReadBurner was an RSS aggregator service which displayed the most popular URLs at any given time based on how many people had shared them through Google Reader's Shared Items. To much disappointment, the site shut its doors last month, when the site's owner Alex Marktl could no longer make time to work on it. However, shortly after ReadBuner closed, Adam Ostrow, of Mashable, along with Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd) and Thomas Connors acquired ReadBurner with plans to bring it back online. Today, ReadBurner is back and brings with it several new features, too.

Techmeme is a great place to stay up-to-date with the current tech news in the blogosphere, showing the most popular and current news items of the day. The site also offers a Leaderboard section which features the current top 100 bloggers and news sources. However, Techmeme is often under fire from bloggers who feel that it doesn't deliver a diverse enough selection of blogs and voices. Whether that's actually true or not is up for debate, but in the meantime, we thought we would look at other ways to stay on top of the the latest news in tech, sans Techmeme.

Have you heard about Toluu yet? This new RSS-based service, currently in private beta, lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because Toluu is very much like the reincarnation of the once-popular site, ShareYourOPML (now defunct), which used to do the same thing. But Toluu not only revives that site's spirit, it does so it a much better fashion than ShareYourOPML ever did.

Hype Machine, the much-loved MP3 blog aggregator service, has long been the place to go to find great tracks and music reviews on the net. In October of last year, the site got a big makeover, which included new social networking features like user profiles where you could list your favorite blogs, bands, searches, and friends. Now, Hype Machine has taken the social aspect a step further with their revamped Dashboard section, which introduces social scrobbling features, just like Last.FM offers, along with other new features and an updated layout.

Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.

Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. With Swotti, you can learn from the good and bad experiences of others as the site gathers together reviews and feedback from across the web and categorizes them to provide you with more information about the product you're interested in. What's unique about this search engine is that it uses semantics to do so.

We've seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we've questioned whether they're adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren't on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?