Web 2.0 and social media are here to stay. Those who see the value in the concept generally see it innately and do not need to be convinced. Some people stick their toe into the social media world and decide the water is way too choppy and changing to stay afloat. There is an immense amount of information out there. Along with that information we can also find even more noise. I've posted before about my Web 2.0 Anxiety disorder. I'm beginning to find a treatment at least (if not a cure). As with all things, balance is the key. I think the key to my online sanity can be found in a wonderful yet multi faceted word: aggregators.

Aggregators come in many different flavors. I'm going to just list a couple of my favorites as they relate to Twitter and News. Hopefully those reading will chime in with some others in the comments. I'd love to learn about more!

Twitter Tools

• Tweetdeck – I use this as my desktop client primarily because it allows me to group people whom I follow on Twitter. I have a group for other ASP.NET developers, a group for Moms, Social Networking Pros, General Geeks, Local Tweeple and a couple others. I've found this to be an invaluable way to keep up once the number of people I follow increased so much. I can now pull up Tweetdeck several times a day (as opposed to staying glued to Twitter) and just scroll through my groups to catch up on information or discussions I've missed.
• Twitturly – This aggregator is for URL's posted on Twitter. It tracks what URL's people are tweeting and ranks them in order of frequency. I love digging through Twitturly each morning and seeing what I may have missed overnight. You can also re-tweet any link right there from the page. I've caught some pretty cool stuff this way.
• Shouting Mat.ch – This one is just like Twitturly except it can break down the tweets into channels if you don't want everything on the web.
• Twitscoop – I really like the UI of this Twitter Tag tracking site. It basically can show you a tag cloud on the front page to see what is trending on Twitter at any particular time. You can search keywords and get graphs of the last six hours' trends. It also has a live feed of users tweeting with your keywords. It's a great way to track a particular product or news item.

News and Browsing

• Mixx – I really like Mixx because it breaks down stories into categories on the main page – it has an easy means to dig through, and it's personalized in that I can have it display only the categories I Like. It's a small subset of data, unlike Digg where I can find myself for hours and hours.
• Alltop – I cannot leave Alltop out of this post. Oh my! I found myself spending two hours browsing shoes and handbags the other day (I am THAT girl, yes)! This site aggregates almost ANYTHING and tracks what you may have visited in the recent past. It displays results in a very concise manner and oh my - the links! Rolling over a link gets you a summary of the content. This is a VERY useful tool!
• Newsified – This is a beta site but I simply MUST tell you how much I dig it. It takes digg, mix, reddit, metafilter, delicious, youtube etc and gives them to you in a news page type fashion – all on one page (similar to the layout of Alltop actually), which makes for a much easier browsing experience. It reminds me quite a bit of a newspaper actually. There are headlines and then a tiny bit of body copy. I just really like the layout here – it cuts through the chaff and gives me the stories. I can get through the data much more quickly this way.

For blogs, I'm finding that many of my peers post their own little aggregators listing daily and weekly links they enjoy. I tend to gravitate more towards these than commercial blog aggregators, as they seem to be vetted through an outlook similar to my own. Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew and Rhonda Tipton's Weekly Link Posts are two good examples of these.

And finally – the ONE AGGREGATOR TO RULE THEM ALL – FRIENDFEED cannot be praised enough. I love Friendfeed basically because it's a one stop shopping spree. I can scroll through and see blog posts, tweets, comments, and shared items from those whom I follow. The UI still requires me to do a bit of scrolling, but to be honest, if I only have say half an hour to catch up on the "world outside of me", I will go to Friendfeed first and scroll. It's an excellent snapshot of what is going on across ALL platforms.

I just love innovation. As we keep having technology problems, there are new technical solutions to come about in order to help us solve them. I'm really eager to see what kind of aggregators and information-narrowing tools arise in the months to come. Please post any you guys like in the comments below!