9 Social Media Aggregators to Simplify Your Online Life

“Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”  — Albert Einstein, scientist

At times Social Networking can be a bit confusing, it seems like every day there is a hot new site popping up.  For those of you who use Social Media as a way to leverage your job search and professional networking it is easy to get lost in the sea of social media.  If your Internet browser looks anything like mine you have at least 20 open tabs, most of them pointing to different social networking sites.  This makes it extremely difficult to keep an organized job search or manage your career.    

As a job seeker or someone looking to stay active in your career development, staying busy on the many social networking sites is a key part in your daily activities.  Social Media Aggregators allow you to do this in an organized and simple way. 

For job seekers or those who are just looking to have a networked career, social media aggregators:

• Provide one entry point to connect with all your contacts
• Allow you to run custom searches on all your social network sites and have them feed into one place
• Give you the ability to filter your contacts – separate professional contacts and personal contacts into specific groups
• Expand your reach
• Provide convenience to you network – Many of these applications give you a single URL to use in your networking.  It saves those looking at your profiles time because they just have to go to one site to get all your information
• Keep you in contact and allow you to make new contacts with those in your field
• Are a one-stop shops for letting all your professional contacts know what you are up to, if you are looking for a job it makes it easier for you to broadcast it out to your networks.
• Allow you to find and get involved in meaningful conversation that might lead you to your next job

Here is a list of some programs that will aide you as job seeker or someone looking to maintain your career networking through social media:

1.  Seesmic – A well-known and commonly used application, Seesmic offers users the comfort of combining their Facebook and Twitter accounts into one simple desktop application.  If you use your social media accounts to network both professionally and personally, you can create groups and filter your contacts by business and personal.  You can also run custom Twitter searches for topics of your choice.  Say you want to get information on a company that interests you, if you type in the company name in the custom search you will be able to see a live feed that is updated every time that company name is mentioned on Twitter.

2.  Tweetdeck – Is another popular application that mashes up your Twitter and Facebook accounts.  Similar to Seesmic, Tweetdeck can be downloaded to your desktop and will allow you to:

• Tweet directly from TweetDeck and share photos or web links
• Manage conversations with @replies and direct messages
• Create Groups to easily follow friends, colleagues or other interest groups
• Follow topics in real-time with saved searches
• Update Facebook and view your friends’ status updates

3.  Swimwire  - Swimwire is an online social media aggregator that brings all of your networking sites together.  By creating a free account it saves you the time and energy of having to visit multiple sites to get updates and protects you against missing out on career opportunities.  You can connect and send messaged to all your Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Classmates, Bebo, Twitter, etc., accounts all in one place.  One key benefit to Swimwire is that you can search for contacts right from their site, see all the sites those contacts are on and connect with them without having to do a search on each different social media site.  

4.  FriendFeed – Recently purchased by Facebook for $50 Million, Friendfeed is a great tool for combining all your social media accounts together.  A social networking site in its own, you can subscribe and connect with other FriendFeed users.  It’s fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items or topics of interest.  FriendFeed allows you to:

• Subscribe to updates from individuals and groups, such as a team of people you work with or wish to work with.
• Contribute to a shared stream of public information for all FriendFeed users to see.  Allowing you to get your name out there for others to see.
• Add most of the popular social media sites to your feed. FriendFeed combines all of your different social networks into a single feed, making yourself easier to follow, or make it easier to follow others.c 

5.  Lifestream.fm – Lifestream.fm is a media and social aggregator that will keep you and your professional contacts informed about what you’re doing.  Lifestream.fm allows you to put your profiles and online activity, making it easy for your friends to see your newest bookmarks, your favorite videos, your tweets, photos you’ve uploaded, your newest blog posts, and more. Rather than listing all your different social media accounts on your resume or online profiles you can just list your Lifestream.fm URL.  It saves those you are networking with the trouble of having to visit all those sites to find out about you.  Here are some of the sites they support:

6.  Digsby – Digsby is a social networking tool that works through instant messaging.  It alerts you of events like new email messages and gives you live constant newsfeeds from your social networking sites.  These updates are shown as a popup message on your desktop.  Digsby is also a multiprotocol IM client that lets you chat with all your connections on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. 

7.  Ping.fm – Ping.fm allows you to post updates to your social media accounts from your mobile phone, IMs, email, and third party apps.  It accepts text and images and soon will even accept videos. Supporting over 40 social networking sites Ping.fm makes it easy to update your accounts through their straight forward posting methods and advanced custom triggers.

8.  Chi.mp – Chi.mp is a content hub and identity management platform that gives you your own domain and Web site – your social hub. With chi.mp, you can bring together the many pieces of your digital life – your content, your contacts – to create Centralized You, and you control “who sees what”.  By using Chi.mp you can: 

• Create a free domain name, OpenID and Website to share in your daily networking
• Create a rich profile with tiered privacy settings, allowing you to choose who gets to see what
• Manage all of your contacts with the Ultimate Black Book
• Import content and services from the Web
• Publish and push your content
• Export your contacts and content at any time

9.  Retaggr – By creating a profile on the Retaggr site, you can merge all your online accounts into one.  When you setup an account you will be asked to add the usernames of all the internet services you use, your contact info, and any other details.  From the information you provide the Retaggr site produces a Profile Card or a Web 2.0 business card, allowing you to communicate and connect with new networking contacts.  The profile card can be added to your blog, email signature or social networking profiles. It provides all your contact details in one place and is easy to update as your online life changes.