In an inspired blog post, Jason Kottke said that social networks aren’t helping us organize; since all of them require different credentials to log in, they’re just adding to the noise. He just might be up to something there. It’s getting harder and harder to remember all those logins, passwords, and most importantly to remember which of your friends are using what network.

Social network aggregators is a relatively new breed of applications which try to consolidate all your various social networking profiles into one, with varying success. Let’s check out 20 biggest competitors in this field.

Profilactic

Profilactic has very recently been upgraded to version 2, which brought a decent amount of new features - a new look, support for Pownce, LinkedIn, Shelfari, and the ability to add more than one account for the same site. At its core, Profilactic still does the same two things: it displays your personal lifestream, which consists of your social networking activity, and a group lifestream from your friends. What it does, it does well; however, we’d still like to see more options to interact with the items in your streams. There’s also the option to create clippings - bits and pieces of information from the web; but this option is not really connected to the rest of the features on the site.

Minggl

Minggl is a browser toolbar that works with Firefox, IE and Flock and promises to “put you in control of your social web universe”. Unfortunately, you’ll have a hard time testing this claim unless you have an invitation code, since Minggl is currently in invitation-only phase. The idea behind Minggl is to “attach” social networking profiles to Minggl and then control them all from one place. You can see an overview of the main features in this video tutorial.

iStalkr

Another application that’s based on the concept of group lifestreaming, iStalkr perhaps chooses the most logical route of all the applications on this list. It enables you to follow your own and your friends’ social networking activities on a timeline, and to act on it directly from iStalkr’s interface. Working with iStalkr, we’ve noticed that the updates aren’t coming that fast; but we’re not sure if this is due to the limitations of various APIs involved or iStalkr itself.

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