It starts so innocently. A blog post here, a social network profile there, a photo upload here, a microblogging update there... The next thing you know, you've got online profiles up the wazoo and friends who seem to be blowing you out of the water with their prodigious writing, photosnapping and updating habits.


Just as your head is about to start spinning around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, you wonder if there's any way to make it stop. When will you be able to turn to your prolific network and utter, "Ego te absolvo"?
In 2006, we created 161 billion gigabytes of information and in 2007, we created 281 billion gigabytes of information. Which means that currently, digital information is being created at a faster pace than that of digital storage. So how is it being curated?
Some tools to help you cope
The good news is that there are a number of people who have realized that this is a growing problem, and they're here to help. They're creating aggregators. This isn't a new term, but it's definitely a hot space right now. Help people make sense of their own and their friends' online effluvia, and you're in good standing.
Here are a few that are emerging that may be worth keeping your eye on.
Spokeo is a social network aggregator that covers about 38 sites. It's got a clean design and includes some entertainment media networks such such as Blockbuster and Pandora.
While Lijit can function as an aggregator of your friends' content, I like that it allows you to post a widget on your blog and share your own activity with your readership. This includes the ability to search for content. Each week, Lijit will share your site's search stats with you in an email.
Riffs is the social recommendation aggregator. It's a single place to recommend all types of media to your friends - books, CDs, mp3s, DVDs, etc. You can tag items for social searching, let Riffs search your recent iTunes playlist and make purchase recommendations, chat about favorites with other like-minded users. An interesting way to aggregate your multimedia preferences.
FriendFeed has been all the rage lately. I've been a beta tester for a while, but only noticed it picking up some steam in the last month or so. FriendFeed is basically another social network where you connect with your friends from various social networks and follow their daily activity in an RSS feed. It tracks only a limited of number of services right now - 28 - but it's got Netflix and Amazon Wishlists in there as some quirky offerings. I'm definitely getting information overload from all of my friends' updates in FriendFeed.
SocialThing made a big debut at the South by Southwest Interactive conference last week and is using limited invitations and "private beta" to build buzz (there's an entirely different post brewing on that subject). It's got a clean design and some nice user settings, like choosing to view lifestreams by user or by time, but it's limited in the number of services it covers.
The aggregator to end all aggregators
The single most impressive social network / lifestream aggregator out there is, hands down, Profilactic. Supporting a whopping 155 sites & services, Profilactic allows you to slow the firehose of information coming at you by allowing you to selectively exclude updates within each of your friends' feeds. It's got a clippings feature that allows you collect information that you've created and that others have created about you - like a digital scrapbook. And finally, you can create a badge and post your information on your site.
When you add that they've just signed a six-figure deal with a major social network, it becomes even more impressive.
I'm glad to see that so many people are trying to solve this problem of information overload. Now let's just hope that we dont' need aggregators for the aggregators...