With the current boom of social networking sites or sites with social networking features some new services have emerged that supposedly helps you monitor all these sites from one place. You can get the latest activities from your friends, all gathered to a single page. Let’s say that one of your friends is hooked on Facebook and another one is using MySpace. In stead of visiting these both sites you can just open a single page to get the latest from your friends.

FriendFeed is maybe the one that has gained the most publicity. On FriendFeed you can monitor activity on loads of sites, including del.icio.us, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and many more.

SecondBrain promises to “manage all your social media, bookmarks and files in one place”. The nice thing about SecondBrain is that it puts thumbnail images of screenshots of the content you have either saved for yourself or that your friends have saved or published.

But PageOnce takes it a step further. Besides what the services above promise to do, PageOnce promises to take care of your passwords, accounts, bills, travels, emails and more. Sounds good? But do we really want to give all that information about ourselves out there, to a relatively unknown service?

Now why do I write about these? These and many more have already been covered in loads of different blogs, so why bring these up?

I think these three are good examples of three very different aproaches to gathering social data (and other data) into a single service. For those social butterflies that spend time hopping between different social networking sites to keep up-to-date with what their friends are doing at that exact moment, these service are great. But for you others, less addicted, on-off social networkers, I wanna question the need to every moment know what others are doing. Why do we need to know what our friends are doing? Are we that curious? Is it curiosity that drives the society forward (or backwards)?