The posts on eWebBuddy are a little infrequent lately but its anyday better than haing no posts at all, what say. But the main reason for this infrequency is in between my hectic schedule, day job, freelance work, churning out quality content becomes a little tough. But worry not, I will always be on the lookout for something great and useful for all my buddies out there.

So what do I have this time? All of us are a big fan of the social networks and are completely hooked thanks to different services. I know many of you are tweeting as you read this. But its becoming quite an hassle managing all the different social accounts and here’s where ‘Social Media Aggregators’ come in picture.

What are Social Media Aggregators?

According to wikipedia, an Aggregator is

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or “personal newspaper.”

In simple words, an aggregator is a tool or a services which groups several of your interests, subscriptions, services together and makes them available to you in one single place. For all those who were not aware, feed readers like google reader or bloglines are Feed Aggregators.

Moving further, ‘Social Media Aggregators’ (SMA) are meant to help you by grouping all your social medias in one single place. By social medias I mean twitter, facwebook, etc…

How they work?

Well, when you subscribe or register or start using a SMA, you will provide it information of all the social networks you want to follow. By information, I mean it could be something as simple as a RSS feed or your login information to various sites. If you are thinking of security, do not worry there are many trust worthy SMAs around.

Once you are registered, you need to login to just one place and get all the updates and happenings in your network. Multiple browser windows and logins will become history.

Some SMAs you can use?

Here are 3 Social Media Aggregators that have gained quite a lot of popularity, are very different from each other and very useful in everyway:

1. Streamy – This is a website which lets you add not just your social networking sites but also your daily blogs, instant messaging tools and a lot more. Log in to just this one site and stay hooked to all your networks.What makes streamy different from other 2 is that it keeps all your social networks arranged in different tabs and does not merge them into one, single feed.


Streamy

2. Flock – This unlike others which are online tools is actually a desktop application, which can be downloaded from here. Flock is a browser like firefox which is better known as a social networking browser and comes integrated with SMAs. A must checkout with several features.


Flock Browser

3. Friendfeed – If you are a fan of Twitter like interface, then this service is for you. Get all the updates from all the services in one place as part of a stream. Others can follow your soical activities by just following your feed and you can do the same for others.
   

   FriendFeed

So, that was SMAs in simple and I hope this will make your life easier. Do tell me about more such aggregators if you know of. Will update the list. This post was a result of a similar post I saw on PCWorld, courtesy of also a couple of pics. The social media image credit goes  to blackglass.

Also, stay on the lookout, we have eWebBuddy’s first ever contest coming up which will give you a chance to win a little something….something!