Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds.

Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate.

So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools:

• De-duplication – When friends post the same update to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, I only get one update.
• Social volume control – Over time, lifestreaming apps should understand the content sources and people to which I pay most attention. I should be able to crank up the volume to show me everything, or dial it down to just the people and sources I really want to know about.
• Relevance – A simple text filter is a no-brainer, but how about a relevance filter, looking at what my connections are reading as a collaborative filter for my own content sources?
• Explore the “long tail” – I want my app to signal to me what’s mainstream and what’s niche, to allow me to drill down to esoteric opinions while at the same time getting a broader picture of what’s happening.
• Visualization – The app should let me see at a glance what’s happening in my sphere of connections and content. Let interesting conversations and contents bubble up to the surface so I only need to be distracted by things of importance.

So, what do you want to see in your lifestreaming toolbox?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide
• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility

In most cases, social networks were not designed specifically with professional applications in mind. Look at MySpace and Facebook, two of the real heavy hitters. Both essentially began as places for friends and family to connect and share. As if it weren’t hard enough to focus on work, if you’re business uses social media, your work tools are designed to distract.

Enter the aggregator. One-stop shopping for all your social networks, or at least those it supports. The hope is that you can eliminate the dreaded window Cycle.

You know the one; you alt-tab, Exposé or click your way through a number of browser windows/tabs and applications, obsessively checking for updates in each. But do aggregators really save you time and attention? Here’s a look at some services, and my experiences with them.

Power.com

Relative newcomer Power.com is still taking its first baby steps, so it’s hard to say for sure how useful this service could eventually become. At the moment, it only supports four services, though they are some of the major players in social networking. Specifically, you can add your Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace accounts. Not a perfect storm of social media, to be sure, but a nice enough kick-off lineup.

The Power.com start page is well conceived. Your messages (comments, wall posts, actual messages, etc.) are listed in chronological order in one convenient window. This is a nice feature, since even on individual sites, I don’t like having to root through three or four different screens just to find everything specifically directed at me.

Unfortunately, beyond that, I find there’s little benefit to be had from Power.com. Clicking most links opens the network’s own site, with a Power.com wrapper which is more distracting than helpful. And the presence of obtrusive ads throughout only adds to the visual congestion.

EventBox

This little gem comes by way of The Cosmic Machine. It’s a standalone program, and unfortunately it’s only available for Mac as of this writing, with no publicized plans to make a Windows version.

Eventbox supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce (not so important anymore, I guess), Reddit and any RSS feed. It doesn’t provide all of the features and functionality of Facebook, but it does do just enough to satisfy your fleeting moments of curiosity, giving you status and photo updates.

I like this application because it does the work of four I was using previously. It also has the benefit of offering just the basics in a clean interface, so you won’t be tempted to go off on unnecessary tangents. With the upcoming HUD interface, it’ll be even more of a wallflower.

Flock

We’ve mentioned this Mozilla-based browser designed for social networking before. Flock provides unparalleled integration for services like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, flickr, and WordPress. Of the options listed here, this is the only to also support blogging sites, which is a definite plus.

For me, though, Flock offers too much of one and not enough of the other. I find its social networking capabilities too full featured, and liable to distract me from core business activities. Fore web working purposes, I would much rather have the customization options of Firefox add-ons, than the all-encompassing social focus of Flock.

FriendFeed

Now FriendFeed is a tool I can get behind. It’s far more targeted than the other services, in that you define the scope of the information you wish to make available, and information you wish to find. You can use it to make a one stop promotional tool for all or a select portion of your personal and professional endeavors, making it basically a self-updating social media C.V.

On the other side of the coin, you can cut through the static and focus on a single contact, making networking a far more refined affair than digging through your various social networks and trying to assemble the resulting information fragments yourself.

When you get right down to it, social media aggregators should be tools that enable greater control, not distractions that control you. In my opinion, that means being utilitarian in the feature set you offer, and leaving access and update decisions to the user’s discretion.

Do you use social media aggregators in your work? What features would you like to see in future versions/products in this category?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes