The aggregators now in existence not only don't really work that well, but in many ways miss the point entirely. It seems to me that the steps involved in building the next generation of social networking tools are threefold: 1) finding fun ways to get users interested in generating lots of information that reflect valid/reliable social concepts and is stored using standardized data conventions 2) develop methods for users to protect, deploy, and control access to the information they generate in creative ways 3) leverage the power this immense data set to encourage the building of web applications that utilize this data in complex, ethical, and somewhat transparent ways. I've been writing an essay<http://www.alexevasion.com/node/146>precisely on this topic and have posted it to the part of my blog where where I grapple with similar ideas related to my identity game project, "The Educated Guess" <http://www.alexevasion.com/node/137>. -- ALEX GOLDMAN <http://www.couchsurfing.com/alexevasion> www.alexevasion.com <http://www.darkestdays.org>