If you haven’t been keeping up with the noise, FriendFeed is the hot startup of the minute. The service launched to the public February 25 and announced $5 million in funding at the same time.

The concept of FriendFeed is simple enough. You add disparate accounts across blogs and social networking services, and Friendfeed aggregates them so friends can follow what you’re doing. The interface is clean, not surprising given the company was founded by ex-Googlers, and using it is easy.

I asked for some feedback on FriendFeed via Twitter and Michael responded saying that Friendfeed was this year’s Twitter, complete with SXSW inflection point. Others, such as Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are talking about the service like it was the most amazing thing they’ve seen in years.

I signed up to FriendFeed yesterday to see what the fuss is about. Having used it for a day I don’t get why FriendFeed is that much better than the range of other services that do exactly the same thing. Plaxo Pulse immediately comes to mind, and there’s Spokeo, Second Brain, Social Thing and Iminta as well. Certainly FriendFeed wins (by a small margin) on usability and scope, but it’s still yet another service in a sea of similar startups.

Then there’s the why behind wanting a feed of content from your friends in the first place. As the chart I pulled from FriendFeed demonstrates, nearly half of all entries from my friends come from Twitter. But if I’m a Twitter user and these are Tweets from friends wouldn’t I be reading them in Twitter anyway? Next comes blogs, and while I may not have every friend’s blog in my feed reader, the ones I mostly want to read I’m already subscribed to. Like Twitter this seems like duplication to me, and FriendFeed doesn’t offer the content from the post either like a full feed would. Google Reader is next on the list: again, duplication as it pulls shared posts from Google Reader…which are shared within Google Reader.

Ah, but you can leave comments on feed entries some will point out and engage in a FriendFeed conversation. If most of the content on a FriendFeed is pulled from Twitter, wouldn’t discussing the points on Twitter be the logical outcome for the majority of people? Blog posts get comments on FriendFeed as well, but how rich an experience is a comment thread based on a headline with a link? As a publisher, wouldn’t you want people to hold these discussions on your blog? There’s already a precedent of sorts as well: coComment tried to take blog commenting to a centralized point without 100% of the conversation remaining on the blog itself, until it realized that it was a failed model.

There is a market for aggregation services, and yet instead of creating a two way interactive service like Google’s still in development SocialStream will be (the real future of aggregation), FriendFeed seems to be nothing more than a fancy RSS service with commenting thrown in for good measure.

I may be wrong on FriendFeed; it took me months to get the appeal of Twitter so I may well end up becoming a FriendFeed convert as well. But what I see so far keeps prompting me to ask “what am I missing?”

MyBlogLog, a blogger social network acquired by Yahoo about a year ago, launched v.2 of their service tonight, with a significant new feature. You can see the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this site – it shows pictures and names of recent visitors.

The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.

Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.

The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.

Another content aggregator launches publicly today, this one with the aim of bringing all of the user generated content you upload across the web into one place where you can organize, search, and share it more easily.

The site is called Second Brain and takes advantage of APIs provided by the likes of Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and eleven other web services. With each, you can provide your username and password, and Second Brain will start keeping track of the content you post there. This content can be kept private or shared with others.

The service is essentially a social network for sharing UGC with friends, which in a way makes it a more advanced version of the website sharing functionality you’ll find on Facebook and other social networks.

Public content sucked into Second Brain shows up in the recent updates areas of your friends pages and the homepage. All content can be categorized, allowing for the grouping of similar content found across different web services (Flickr photos and YouTube videos about technology, for example, can be grouped together on Second Brain). You can also comment on all the content brought into the site, allowing discussions to form around people’s contributions.

I can see this service appealing to people who upload content to several destinations around the web. However, I also expect more established social networks to eventually allow you to automatically pull in, say, all your Delicious bookmarks automatically and share them with your friends. Wait a minute, you can already do this with a Facebook app. And Facebook has announced that it’s opening up its news feed to third party services. Oh well.

Second Brain isn’t exactly charting new territory – FriendFeed, Spokeo, and Iminta are three others that already have been trying to solve the problem of content dispersion. Second Brain founder Lars Teigen argues that they are taking things much further than those other companies by building a more comprehensive library of users’ content. Imported items retain their tags, which are used to create a “meta-tag cloud” of all different types of content. Content can be indexed and searched in more advanced ways, and the company is working on two-way data push capabilities so that you can not only retrieve content from other web services but update it from Second Brain as well. With these longer term features in mind, Second Brain hopes to be your go-to destination for all UGC management.

Below is a promotional video for Second Brain:

San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta on Tuesday. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs.

There are other services that are very similar – FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) – I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends – we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here).

One of the most addictive features of Facebook is its “News Feed” that keeps you up to date on every inane action any one of your friends has taken on the social network (and some partner sites via Beacon). But what if you want to keep track of what all your friends are doing on other parts of the Web, whether they just added a photo to Flickr, a bookmark to Digg, a product to their Amazon wish list, or sent out a new Twitter?

There are so many social sites out there that it is hard to keep track of them all. Harrison Tang, the founder of Spokeo, just made it easier with the relaunch of his site today.

Spokeo 2.0 is like a blog reader for all of your friends’ activities across more than 30 social Websites, including Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pandora, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live Spaces, Yelp, and YouTube. (Delicious is conspicuously absent). Similar to FriendFeed, it presents the latest actions on the Web from your friends as a continually updating stream. It is like a blog reader for what your friends are up to. (It also happens to be regular RSS reader).

What makes Spokeo compelling, at least initially, is that it is dead-simple to set up. In one fell swoop Spokeo can ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, and then go out to the 30+ sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book. I tried this with my Gmail account, and it built up a friend reader with more than 500 contacts in less than three minutes. Before, this was a laborious process on Spokeo. You had to add each friend’s blog or feed one by one. (In comparison, FriendFeed lets you suck in your Facebook friends, but only the ones who are also FriendFeed users—plus each member must specify which sites he wants to expose to others.

It is pretty surprising to find out what people (who you think you know) are listening to on Pandora or Twittering about. It feels a lot like spying on your friends. The best part is that they don’t ever have to know you are keeping track of them. Spokeo is not trying to build another social network. It is trying to help you keep track of the zillion social sites you already belong to. In fact, notes Tang with pride:

We’ve ripped out any sharing, commenting, or messaging feature that would make us resemble another social network. Spokeo is strictly positioned as a reader for your friends’ updates.

When you join Spokeo, you see all your friends’ updates from different services right away. There is no network for you to build, even if you want to. There is no friend request to send; in fact, your friends don’t even know you are following them.

If this rings privacy alarms, Tang notes:

We only access publicly available information on the Internet, so we don’t know anything that you don’t have access to. For example, Flickr has a feature that allows users to search for their friends by email. Spokeo simply calls that Flickr API. Blogger does not support that feature, so Spokeo cannot find your friends on Blogger.

The contact ingestion feature alone is going to be enough to get lots of people to try this out. Whether they keep coming back, though, is another issue. At least with my Spokeo home page, the friend stream tends to be dominated by Twitters. Those can get annoying. Also, I don’t want to keep track of every single person who has emailed me on Gmail, which automatically adds everyone as a contact. Spokeo lets you delete names and group people together, but that creates another management problem in and of itself. (I know, I’m lazy).

Spokeo’s appeal depends entirely upon how interesting your friends and contacts are, and whether they are so prolific across the Web that it is not possible to keep track of them on one major site like Facebook or Twitter alone. But then, everyone has different interests and will gravitate towards different Web services. Spokeo extends the feed reader metaphor to your friends activities—something I expect we will be seeing a lot more of in the near future. (Spokeo has only raised a small seed round from friends and family. Guy Kawasaki is an adviser to the startup).

Here is what my Spokeo home page looks like:

If you click on someone’s name, like Michael Arrington, you see just their stream:

What we’ve called Y Combinator’s European clone, Y Europe, has let loose with their first startup, Soup.io.

Soup.io is very low friction take on life streaming that serves as an aggregator for a lot of your public social media feeds. There are a lot of startups trying to do social aggregation (Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser). Paul Buchheit’s highly automated FriendFeed looks like one of the best so far, but Soup.io is another easy to use alternative despite being manual.

Without needing to sign up, you can easily combine feeds from services like: Flickr, Digg, LiveJournal, Delicious, eBay, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vox, YouTube, Zoomr, or any other RSS feed. Soup.io also has a bookmarklet that lets users easily add content to their feed from around the web, turning it into kind of a tumble blog. All the feeds are displayed in dated order on a customizable profile page. Signing up means you can connect with friends, follow their feeds, and link your feed to your own domain name.

Each of these “life streaming” services is applying the news feed paradigm to the web, but not wrapped in the same sense of place and purpose as Facebook’s social network. Most life streaming services are just really simple RSS readers or replace a bunch of social networks with another somewhat clunky meta one. However, as social sites open up their information, services like Soup will benefit and the real question will change from how to aggregate your content, to what really interesting services you can run on top of them.

Spokeo wants to be your home page. They want to bring you your favorite blog feeds, MySpace updates, new YouTube videos, and friends’ photo albums all in one eyeful.

Spokeo combines the top 20 social networking destinations with any RSS feeds you like into one glimpse through a multimedia RSS reader. But you can’t actually navigate within the networks. It just gives you a run-down. Sort of like My Yahoo! for Web 2.0 sites.

“The problem with start pages like My Yahoo! is the personalization part,” said Harrison Tang, founder of Spokeo, in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “People don’t really know how to add content. It takes like ten steps and a lot of people don’t know how to do it. So we’re assuming that most people are interested in reading online information on the same page that tells you where your friends are, what pictures they’re taking, and what your favorite blogs like TechCrunch are saying.” [I swear he said TechCrunch!]

This is a great idea but it needs some work. For starters, (and here is the woman in me speaking), it’s just not pretty. And it could learn from My Yahoo! and at least give me my local weather. Also, it’s not easy to import information to the site. I tried to get it to feed my MySpace info and somehow ended up with MySpace buddies and information for someone named Gnatalie instead. Shouldn’t I need a password to do that? Consequently, I had a pretty hard time figuring out how to get Gnatalie off of my page and get my own MySpace information on.

Your Spokeo home page is organized into three categories on the side bar: Me, My Friends, and Featured Users. Users can then navigate what their friends or popular Spokeos are up to based on their tags or activities.

Spokeo was started by four Stanford buddies who love MySpace and Flickr and quite obviously TechCrunch and were tired of not having all of their info in one place. The site was funded through “angel investors” so far…meaning their parents.