My exposure to Interactive Marketing and Social Media has been ample and rapid in the last month, since I started my Internship with an Internet startup. In the quest to learn by doing, I have been using several different web services and trying out some Twitter clients (which there are a multitide of! Consolidation anyone?)

I recently realized how many social media profiles I have, and how difficult it has become to track friends' activities and keep in touch + network. Different sets of friends and contacts are spread out across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogger, Gtalk, Shelfari, Flickr, Picasaweb, Ning and Slideshare and I frequently leave comments and update status messages across these networks. I felt the need for a platform where my friends could see posts from all my networks on one neat page. Conversely, I wanted the convenience of having to access just one page where I could see what my friends are reading / posting / commenting about.

Apart from having a consolidated 'feed' of everything my friends are doing, I also wanted to make it easier for people searching for me online, to arrive at one page that reflects my social media networks, and then guides them to access the appropriate profile page.

My internship mentor suggested FriendFeed to me. I went through the FAQ to learn how to use it, and read more about what a powerful tool it really is. It does however, have far less users than Twitter, which is a simpler, more user-friendly version of FF. I opened an account with them last week and while the need to see a consolidated feed is fulfilled, it is definitely not as likeable as Twitter is (no really, Twitter is fun!What with Followfridays and hashtags, replies, retweets and DM's, it's like you're in a roomful of chatty people). They still don't have a way to incorporate @ replies on Twitter into the feed, along with comments that friends make on Facebook posts. They also need to work on expanding the sites one can import feeds from (currently only 58 - missing Wordpress). What I do really like about FF is the 'best of the week' updates I get in my inbox which sends me a summary of the most liked / commented / viewed links and posts by my friends in the week.

There have been many leaps in the development of social media platforms in the last year, and I'm still struggling to get a handle on the size and spread of all the nifty tools and services out there to build your online brand. I am however waiting for an era of consolidation (which shouldn't be very far from now).

Reading I did to write this post:

Andrew Keen's Blog: http://bit.ly/WwPSE

Venture Beat http://bit.ly/xBURg

And ofcourse - general reading on Mashable