I'm a sucker for the latest and greatest website or service. There are hundreds of sites on the Internet where you can share your favorite music, photos, or pointless musings. While it's great to have so many sites to choose from it can be a pain for casual followers who are more accustomed to getting everything in one spot. I recently commented that my goal for the next few weeks was to unify my many, disparate feeds into one easy to follow stream of information.

So why would I want to do that? For starters any capacity for anonymity the Internet possessed is long gone. These days there are sites that specialize in archiving web pages, message boards, and even a record or every domain name you've ever owned. To make matters worse services like YouTube and facebook have long toyed with the concept of content ownership and leave serious doubt about how easily one's information could be removed. Simply put you can post few things these days which are ultimately tied back to your real identity.

The second, less paranoid, reason for content unification is because of the sheer amount of data there is to wade through. In a given month I update information or content on five or six different sites. If you weren't tied into all of those sites chance are you missed something. I may upload photos to Flickr, publish a story here about my vacation while at the same time commenting on the day-to-day experiences on facebook or twitter. In order to get the entire story you'd need to monitor all of those channels.

You could subscribe to half a dozen RSS feeds or you could consolidate the feeds into a single feed and rebroadcast it. In some circles this is called Lifecasting but to me that term is too specific. The point is not simply to broadcast one's life events across the web, but instead to pick À la carte the services you'd like to use and to bring them together into the total experience.

In my case the solution was a service called friendfeed. The site takes the various RSS feeds from your social media sites and combines them. I was able to pull feeds from YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and this site all into a single feed. I was also able to automatically sync posts between Tumblr and Twitter automatically via a new feature the site implemented. I topped the entire system off by importing the friendfeed information as standard RSS into facebook which has become the central hub of my information.

Truthfully the system sounds much more complicated that it is. To set up the entire process all I had to do was collect the various RSS links from my public pages and paste them into friendfeed. In many cases friendfeed already has a custom import setup so that content is added to the new feed in a meaningful way.