was one of the first social media aggregators to hit the scene in a big way. Founded by a handful of former Google employees, FriendFeed consolidates social updates from 58 services (at the time of this writing), from Facebook and Twitter to Google Reader, Last.fm, and even Netflix (letting your buddies know what movies you've queued).

In stark contrast to the other two offerings compared here, which pull your friends' activity directly from your social sites into a centralized tool, FriendFeed focuses more on you, allowing you to pull all of your social output into one central location. That is, rather than providing you with a single place to keep track your buddies' output, the first thing FriendFeed does is provide your friends with a single place to keep track of you.

For example, FriendFeed can aggregate all of your tweets, Facebook status updates, and even posts from your blog, so rather than your trying to update all of your social sites every time you do something on the Web, your friends can just subscribe to your FriendFeed to see all of your updates in one place, no matter where you've posted them. As an added bonus, your friends don't have to go looking for you every time you start a new account somewhere, since presumably you'd add any new social accounts to your FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is laid out a lot like Twitter, but instead of showing just tweets, it collects everything you do online (or at least everything you do on a connected service). If you really like the FriendFeed interface, you can post updates to FriendFeed and Twitter simultaneously from your home page. As an added bonus, when you follow people on FriendFeed, you get access to all of their updates in real time--you don't even have to refresh your browser.

Next: Which Aggregator Is for You?