With new social sites cropping up and more information to manage in more places, how do you deal with the social sites you are a member of? Do you visit individually? Or do you manage them using a third party app (web or desktop) to aggregate and connect with your friends/followers? If you could design a service to bring your profiles together what would it do?
I have my own little aggregator running, it's still very much under development though. I'm trying to get away from the 'there goes the neighbourhood' feeling that almost every social network seems to suffer from sooner or later.
I think that there is much more 'value' in an upvote or a downvote of an article / comment than just the 'karma' the way HN,/., digg and so on use it.
I think friendfeed has almost all the features i would want, except a user base comparable to twitter. Most of the people in my network tend more towards twitter, so FF hasn't proved that useful for me yet.
Otherwise you can aggregate bunch of social network profiles already, and for the ones not supported you can add a custom RSS feed.
I browse them individually. I don't really trust giving my credentials to aggregators. I only really use a few so it isn't worth it to have a separate app/site.
Yes oauth is on my todo list - it seems to have settled down now. We are different to friendfeed in that you friends don't have to join in order for us to aggregate their content your friends are imported from the networks you are on like in a twitter client. Also we can fetch protected content such as flickr family/friends photos, private twitter and facebook content that you have access to.
I stopped using MySpace except for IM on my phone. Twitter posts to Facebook, and I only use 3rd party twitter apps. If I have to use Facebook to reply to a message, I use the iPhone app. So I guess I use my iPhone to aggregate them all.
What I do: browser bookmarks + regular calendar reminders "should I visit network xyz?". (No email notifications or anything.)
If I could design a service...
It would pick the _type_ of new stuff of each network of my choosing and aggregate like a Feedreader. With type I mean for example: new entries on my wall in a given Ning community, but no personal messages and aggregate those together with friend requests on Facebook.
I think that there is much more 'value' in an upvote or a downvote of an article / comment than just the 'karma' the way HN,/., digg and so on use it.
Easier said than done though :)
Also, I absolutely suck at design...