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New tools called social media aggregators have risen to address that challenge. Their goal: to provide you with one simple point of entry where you can keep track of the streams from any and all of the most popular social networking sites. A bunch of social media aggregators (or "life-streaming" tools, as they're sometimes called) have shown up in recent years, but some social media services don't always do the job you need them to do. Here's a look at the three that, in our estimation, fulfill the promise of social media aggregation most completely: Streamy, Flock, and FriendFeed.

Streamy

Streamy is a Web site designed to collect not just all of your favorite social media sites but also blogs and instant messaging tools, putting them into one self-contained dashboard.

The first time you log in to Streamy, you won't see much of consequence--that's because you need to link your services with Streamy first. Click on the Setup link on the top left, and you'll see nine different services to choose from, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Digg, Flickr, and even FriendFeed.

Unlike Flock and FriendFeed, Streamy doesn't pull all of your separate social sites into a single, aggregated river of social updates. Instead it keeps each service in a separate "tab," which you can access by clicking on the icon for each service. The nice thing about this arrangement is that Streamy allows you to customize each service with advanced layouts and widgets to keep up with custom searches (in Flickr or Twitter, for example) or tagged photos or events (in Facebook).

As such, Streamy doesn't merely act as a dashboard for all of your social media sites; it also allows you to create a custom dashboard for every site, offering a heads-up view of what's going on at each individual site based on what's important to you.