I admit it, that as someone who lives a lot of his life online these days, there is an obscure electronic paper trail of stuff I regularly update that would literally be a mile long if you printed it all out; not just the four blogs I maintain, which is where the majority of my audience follows along, but also such niche information as my linkroll at del.icio.us, all my latest cellphone photos at Flickr and videos at YouTube, my chat status at GTalk, my latest freelance clients at LinkedIn, my latest book reviews at Goodreads, even my movie queue list at Netflix. In fact, there are a whole lot of us now who are tracking a plethora of daily information about our lives at such places (and let's not even get into the informational black hole which is Twitter); and if we can barely keep track of the accounts that we ourselves are maintaining, how the hell could we possibly expect to keep track of the hundreds of online friends and acquaintances we have as well?

The subject is known as "super aggregation" or "smart aggregation," and is being endlessly discussed among a whole lot of people in the tech industry these days; and now into this chaos comes the new free service FriendFeed, one of the first to offer up a really smart way of aggregating all this aggregation into something truly useful. Basically, as you can see in the above graphic, the service has already set up API portals for 33 other online services now, as well as the ability to accept any RSS feed in existence, meaning that you can now set up one "uberfeed" there that tracks just about everything in your online life that you do. The service then collects all this info on a central account page (here's mine, for example), with the raw data grouped in smart ways so that its sheer wealth doesn't overwhelm you; that page has its own RSS feed, then, replacing in my particular case a grand total of 12 separate feeds that were formerly needed to track all this info. And then of course this works the other way as well; you can seek out and find your own friends there too, and subscribe to their singular FriendFeed URL that will sometimes replace a dozen or more small ones.

It's not a perfect solution by any means (for example, I'd love to see the ability to self-filter these lists, as in "Here is everything I've posted online this week regarding Second Life and nothing else"); but then again, this is a brand-new topic in the worlds of information and business, a topic whose full challenges haven't even yet been identified, much less the solutions to these challenges. It's definitely a fascinating approach to the subject of information overload and of the aggregation of aggregation; and as someone who's now used it himself, let me assure everyone that FriendFeed technically works well too (and thankfully doesn't spam your address book either, when you're simply looking for other friends who are already there*). I encourage you to give it a test-drive if you're like me and update a lot of different accounts online on a regular basis.

*And by the way, looking for existing friends at FriendFeed today reminded me yet again that the most important list in my life is surprisingly enough my Gmail address book; after all, it's the "master list" off which all other lists in my life get their own information, from my "existing friends" at social networks to the synchronized address books on my desktop and cellphone. Who would've guessed that our humble email address lists would one day become so powerful?