Google's Socialstream

Google comes to the table with a social networks aggregator.

From the site:

"Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This project was guided by three goals that built upon each other:

Initial Task: Rethink and reinvent online social networking

Refined Focus: Discover the user needs related to social networking and explore how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.

Prototype Goal: Create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks."

From The Red Herring:

"It is unclear how a Google-backed social network aggregator would grab content from other social networks. In theory this could steal page views from other social-networking sites, such as MySpace, and Facebook. It’s unclear how—or if—other competing social networks would provide their content to a Google social network.

“All participating sites would simply share information through it,” the Socialstream web site reads. “While the centralization of social information would enhance all applications that use it, the [unified social network’s] own interface would be very simple, perhaps only focusing on preferences and privacy controls that applied everywhere.”

The idea of an aggregated social network is a solution to the problem of avid web users who have signed up for a variety of social-networking sites—from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn and Flickr—and cannot keep track of them all."