Twitter Nation

Perhaps given the success of Twitter, it's no surprise that there is a new wave of clones: venture capitalists smell money in the water. "If you look at any technology trend of this sort that is developed by technologists, put forward through startups and funded by venture capitalists, you're going to have a shakeout and you're going to have winners," says John Palfrey, coauthor of the forthcoming book "Born Digital." "I'm not surprised at all to see a series of copycat services emerge and get funded."

Still, even Twitter can be just more digital noise. Who has the time to check in on even one single BFF's doings at Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and even Netflix in any given afternoon? And, really, who cares what you just had for lunch? "It's allowing for more conversation, social, business or otherwise," says Chris Brogan, a social-media consultant. "But I'm suddenly tending to a lot of stores." Enter the aggregators: one-stop Web sites that let you see what your friends are up to in their various Web travels. "As people are rapidly moving toward [services like] Twitter and Tumblr, it will force us to a mode where the consumption tools need to be on a separate platform," says David Karp, the wunderkid founder of Tumblr, which has 315,000 registered users. "What we're doing now is agreeing to use one tool that allows us to be in the same place."

For example, FriendFeed, Swurl and Spokeo are slightly creepy new tools that allow users to see a wide swath of their friends' online activity in one place. Users allow these sites to pull their most recent activity from an array of Web services, and then invite friends to monitor and comment on each update (a new photo at Flickr here, a new blog post there), all on a single page. But read those last two sentences—we just mentioned not one, but three aggregators. How long before some enterprising developer builds an aggregator that aggregates the aggregators? No one ever said sharing was easy.

© 2008