Social networking has taken on a life of it's own. It seems there are just so many different sites to publish to and share information with your social network. With products like Diaspora coming out, fully funded by the public, and other controversial privacy related sites like Facebook, social networks claim to store millions of users.

So many users live here.

facebook , myspace , twitter , flickr , youtube , last.fm , digg , friendster , linkedin , virb , librarything , 43things , bebo , hi5 , orkut , livejournal , technorati , xanga , deviantart , mybloglog , Disapora, google , wikipedia , blogger , vox , multiply , ebay , photobucket , amazon , stumbleupon , 9rules , gmail , delicious , bloglines , yahoo , xing , tagworld , claimid , upcoming , tridea , tagged , pandora... ETC.

And if you know the pigeonhole principle, then you'll be guaranteed to find a huge intersection between users across multiple social networks. 

I personally belong to Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon, and have become looking for a way to consolidate all streams without visiting the actual sites.

Solution: HootSuite

HootSuite is a brilliant way to track what's going on in your social network circle, consolidated to one place. You don't need to install any software on your computer, because this is all online. 

After signing up to HootSuite, you can add all your streams on one page, or create a tab and add more streams there. The great thing about HootSuite is it can keep statistics on shortened URLs, so if you post an interesting article to Twitter through HootSuite, it can track how many users have clicked on it and where they are coming from. A great integration with Firefox enables you to use a bookmark to automatically shorten a URL and send it through the social networks of your choice.

Note: There are other sites that provide tracking shortened URLs, like bit.ly.

HootSuite's interface is flexible and provides different themes. You can also set the refresh rate from 2 to 30 minutes. I would recommend if you have a Twitter account to synchronize every 10 minutes depending on how many people you follow. That way, you can get a large chunk of updates at once.

Another option in HootSuite is to Hoot directly from RSS feeds. If you have a blog, you can subscribe it to HootSuite and every time you post a blog entry, it will post on any/all selected social networks you choose. HootSuite also offers the option to prefix the post with a custom text, like "MYBLOG: new post" published to Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can also search through the posts from the main page.

The best thing about HootSuite is that it's absolutely a must have for companies. In this way, you can create an instant platform on which all your employees can post updates. Team collaboration is supported by HootSuite's Assignments feature, which can assign a status update to a user.

With it's sleek and easy to use interface, I've scrapped a lot of my bookmarks and started checking HootSuite directly for status updates. I hope that this product will be able to support more streams in the future.

...Did I mention it is fully compatible with the iPhone?

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