Social Media Aggregators

On the lookout for a social media aggregation tool, I came across 7 Social Media Aggregation Tools To Simplify Your Streams, published earlier this year on the socialmedia today blog. Amongst the usual suspects, Hootsuite (which I have yet to try), Netvibes (popular with some learning lab folks), and Tweetdeck, there were three I hadn’t heard of before: Yoono, the unfortunately named Profilactic and Socialite. Apart from Tweetdeck, which is an Adobe Air application, and Socialite, which is a Mac app(!), the other four are web applications and work in your browser.

Also mentioned was the Flock Social Browser (illustrated) which I’ve tried before but thought I’d try again. Flock is interesting in that it connects to your social networks and provides community monitoring, tools for media sharing, RSS feed reading, and blogging all within a web browser. It’s pretty slick and I think I’ll use it as my main interface to my social networks for a couple of weeks to see if it sticks. Flock is also based on the Mozilla browser engine that powers Firefox, so it also gives you aceess to your favourite Firefox extensions. It of course suffers from the problem that it has to be set up on each of your computers.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

2 Comments

  1. My favourite is TweetDeck but as you have to install it (which isnt possible without admin access on the pc) HootSuite is a good alternative for browser based apps and does much the same thing. I used it for a presentation on How to use Twitter as your PLN and it went down quite well.

    http://www.slideshare.net/juliadesigns/usingtwitteraspln-part1

    Seesmic Web is also worth exploring.

    http://seesmic.com/app

  2. Julia, does HootSuite bring all the social media together? My brief inventory: Twitter; Facebook; Buzz; YouTube; SlideShare; Google Reader; Delicious; Flickr.

    Flock knows about most of these (not Buzz interestingly) and has it's own feed reader … but I'm reluctant to give up Google Reader.

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