Social Feed Aggregators Make My Head Hurt

One of my favorite innovations that social applications have brought us is being able to see the stream of activity that my friends have engaged in on a site. I spend way more time on Facebook's News Feed page than I do staring at my own (or any of my friend's) profile.  Having a presence on nearly every social platform and many friends that are just as active as I am means that there are lots of places to try and keep track of what my friends are up to.   Clearly others have experienced this same pain as the hottest new trend seems to be sites that aggregate these streams and try to make friend content consumption more efficient.  Louis Gray has done a great job covering this space if you are interested in learning more.

In theory I love the idea of having a single place I can see what all my friends are up to.  I have experimented with Plaxo, Spokeo and today's next great thing and after the initial oohs and aahs of seeing a huge list of activity I just haven't been able to find a long term value that would keep me using these services.  Maybe I am totally missing something but here are the two big problems I have run into in my use of these services:

1.  So while these services may grab my activity from Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, etc I still have to go to each of these sites to perform whatever action it is these feed aggregators are going to grab.  This means I will see the activity of all my friends on that service.  Now when I return to my feed aggregator I have to go through a bunch of redundant information to find the new stuff.  It may not sound like a big deal but when the goal is to fight off information fatigue it certainly adds a level of frustration.
2.  Lots of sites allow you to re-purpose the feeds you create.  My favorite example of this is Tumblr where I pull in my tweets and delicious bookmarks.  The problem is that I have lots of friends that I am connected to on Twitter who have the Twitter app in Facebook, who then pull their Twitter messages in Tumblr.  By the time I get to a feed aggregator I have seen the same piece of information four or more times.  Information overload starts to feel much worse at this point.

As the social stream aggregation market matures I am sure most of these issues will be worked out.  With a lot of players (and the 800 pound gorilla) entering this space it will be exciting to see who figures it out first.