A post I recently read that covered the launch of a new service called Friendfeed sparked up a discussion with a colleague about the proliferation of “web 2.0″ and the sharing of information on the web. Not to knock on social aggregators like this new service, but in the last roughly six months I’ve seen services like Spokeo, Plaxo Pulse, Iminta, and a host of news aggregators all launch similar products (let me know if I forgot any).

What if I told you:

“I’m working on a service that takes all the data from these new aggregation services, determines which networks my friends are most active in, relates that to my interests and activity, and re-aggregates the results in an easy to read, and bubbly environment?”

If you were a VC, you’d ask me where to mail the check , if you were the common Internet user, you’d tell me I was an idiot.

Ever since the launch of iGoogle, which I praised here, I’ve really changed the way I process information. I have a dedicated tab of all the blogs I like; there’s the usuals like TechCrunch and Mashable, a few fellow Canadian based bloggers I like hearing from like Mathew Ingram and Rick Segal, and a bunch of other tech, social media, and home based entrepreneurial bloggers I enjoy.

All of the blogs I’ve mentioned above, (aside from Rick) take the same positive attitude toward this and similar services. What I’m a little disappointed in is the lack of rigor that goes into investigating and evaluating. Are any of these services going to return more than their initial multi-million dollar investments? Does anyone even care?

Sure it may be cool to see what your tech savvy friends are up to, but your tech savvy friends aren’t clicking advertisements and neither are you. Will a paid subscription model work? Probably not. They’re too simple of a service to warrant paying for and undoubtedly more successful under a free model.

We’re going down a path where we spend less time having real, personal interaction, and more time learning what everyone else is up to from a feed. Now thanks to these new services, we can communicate even less because I can now find everything I need to know in one spot.

I postulate (probably along with many others) that the market will catch up to this fact and we’ll see a 2nd bubble burst. When the dust settles, services that use the web to connect us in reality will flourish, and social networking will get back to its roots: connecting people.

*idea* – possible cool slogan for a startup : “connect people, not feeds.”

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!