Phil Bradley recently drew my attention to a new type of resource - the social aggregation website. These sites scour the Internet to find information about your friends, and then draw it all together in one easy-to-read page. Spokeo takes the contacts from your email and traces all the different "social" sites they have signed up to, including blogs, Amazon, photo sites such as Flikr, Facebook, etc. Then it informs you when they post new content to any of these services.
In a similar way, Iminta allows you and your friends to share what you're "inta" - so your friends don't need to sign up for all the services you belong to. It is quite keen on privacy - you can allow different groups of people to see different amounts of your "stuff". And Friendfeed gives you a customised feed of the things your friends are sharing online.
Second Brain advertises itself slightly differently - rather than aiming to help you see what your friends have posted online, it is designed to help you to keep track of all your own content, tag it and share it.
What do you think? Is this sensible, worrying, terrifying? Would you feel as though you were spying on your friends? A review of Spokeo suggests that it provides "a gold mine for private investigators, stalkers and other unsavory people"...
