There has been alot of talk about Social Aggregators lately. Two of the biggest are FriendFeed and SocialThing!, but there are so many more out there. I joined both of these recently and have been getting my feet wet to see if they really are what everyone is cracking them up to be. I read some posts recently about how these services are changing the way Social Media folks are getting their news and information and something just didn’t add up. Robert Scoble’s post on this was one of the central discussions that got me thinking. Aren’t these the same people that were all up on RSS and how Feed Readers have become their central point of contact with everyone? I remember a video of Robert Scoble where he talked about how he at one point was reading around 1500 RSS feeds on Google Reader and how Google Reader is THE MAIN WAY he gets content.

Then came Gabe Rivera and his amazing Techmeme, the Newspaper for the New Web Industry. New voices bubbled to its front pages, and then sidestepped to make way for the big guys. Well along came Facebook and its innovations with the News Feed. All of a sudden this was the way people found new and interesting content. Well now that people have added thousands of Facebook friends the white noise has become too much and there is “too much app in the way.” Thus we have now moved on to these, Social Aggregators. The Streamers of your Life(not the girly kind that hang off your pink bicycle).

So what happened, have these methods of sourcing new and interesting content broken? Have the development teams stopped working on them? Absolutely not. If anything, these tools and applications have gotten better and better. Then why does the Social Media Elite have Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to their tools of the trade? We get a hint of the answer in Robert Scoble’s post on how Social Aggregaters are his way of sourcing new content.

“I just switched all my home pages off of TechMeme to FriendFeed.

I find that TechMeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).

I miss the individual voices and I think that’s really why FriendFeed has gotten my attention.”

According to Robert, its because these tools have lost their homely community touch. It feels dare I say “mainstream” to him. Oh its not just him, its many others who have followed this path but have just not said it. But the problem is that these people have not dug deep enough and looked at the core reason why these services just stop working for them. The services are better, the apps are better, so whats the problem?

The people are.

We in the social media industry have begun to fire on the same cyclinders as the startups we follow. A new service launches, we are right there with it, watching it grow and cheering it on. And then a competitor launches, and we jump on that one, loving the pureness of its existence and as the late great actor Peter Boyle of Everybody Loves Raymond once said, “I’m suckin in that youth.” Until a new industry launches atop the previous one, showing us a new path. This cycle has continued for years. This is because we as social media folks have Attention Deficit Disorder. We hop from one application to another, “sucking in that youth” during its growing season, watch it get picked up by the 1st layer of mainstream Social Media users, and look for our next victim, lamenting the loss of our late tool. But please understand folks, to a major degree, mainstream means success.

Now I’m not going to go into the nuances of what I just said, but at a general level, thats true. If High Quality professional content is bubbling to the top of Techmeme, that means Techmeme itself has been legitimized by its mass adoption. If Social Networks are becoming a fast and furious brain of activity too noisy to find the gold nuggets, that means thousands and millions more are using it. We are victims of our own loud mouths, yelling and screaming at how great this application is and then lamenting its loss when we move on. Trust me people, the applications are going to be okay without you, they will survive. But I’m not sure the social media folks will be able to. Guys like Robert Scoble will keep having one night stands with applications from now into the unknown future, because they crave that purity of discussion, but most importantly they cannot accept the mainstream. Even if the application is perfectly capable of offering what they need, you dont become a first adopter by hearing the words “you’ve got mail,” you become one by seeing that beta sign and smiling, cause you know your home.

Just for the weekend.