Aggregation, Syndication, Integration… Part I

ag·gre·ga·tion Pronunciation: \ˌa-gri-ˈgā-shən\

1 : a group, body, or mass composed of many distinct parts or individuals
2 a : the collecting of units or parts into a mass or whole b : the condition of being so collected

source

Aggregation is one part of a social networking and social media strategy. Simply put, in order to keep up with the rush of information, we need to collect, classify and filter it.  This allows us to spend the most time on the most important information, and skip the rest.

With Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Flickr and a zillion other networks, aggregating feeds can be quite challenging.  There are some tools that can help, though.

To start with, within some of the applications there are ways to bring in other info…  Through tools like FriendFeed and Ping.fm we can get a lot of our monitored feeds into just a few places.  I think that FriendFeed might be the best of these tools. Plaxo is also an excellent way to stay on top of multiple networks.

Specifically with Twitter, tools like TweetVisor and TweetDeck are great for keeping up with large numbers of followees (the people we follow) so that we can interact with them.  TweetDeck, for example, can allow us to run various streams at the same time with different groups or hashtags (like #activerain).

Finally, there is another tools that can be used to aggregate more feeds than any of the others I have run across so far.  It is also more effective as a filter, allowing the user to determine how much they want to see, although it doesn’t filter based on actual content… it filters based on the user’s input.  It is called Gist.

Keep in mind…

Any of these tools would be worthy of a write-up longer than this whole post.  To find out more, it would be advisable to check out their sites and see what they are about.

Feel free to share YOUR experiences in the comments.  Your fellow Readers would love to see opinions other than mine…

from Lane’s AR blog