Trillian, if you don’t know, is an instant messaging client that works with the AOL AIM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, and IRC chat systems, any or all at the same time, channeling your chat activity through one interface. Spokeo, founded by three Stanford guys, applies the same concept of tributary merging to the proliferation of social networking, blog, photo and video systems as well as RSS feeds. Just launched, Spokeo currently supports social networks Bebo, Facebox, Friendster, MySpace, Wretch, Xanga; blog, photo, and miscellaneous sites Blogger, DeviantArt, Digg, Flickr, Fotolog, ImageStation, LiveJournal, PhotoBucket, PictureTrail, Piczo, WebShots, Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo Video, YouTube.

I’ve never found the idea of Trillian attractive. I’m a software junkie and prefer to use each chat system through their respective clients. Each client is a unique creation and Trillian is a common denominator that often fumbles features such as file transfer or voice chat. But I have friends who swear by it. To them the utility of chatting – sending and receiving text – and managing their buddy lists across several systems through one interface outweighs the aesthetic drawbacks and the deficiencies in seldom used features.

Spokeo seems even more useful for its targeted space than Trillian is for chat; most if not all of these community systems place your friends’ pictures, blogs, and videos on individual profile pages. Except for possibly a list of blog subscriptions, you’d have to surf each account to keep up to date. Spokeo distills that content, from their often noisy profiles, and aggregates them all by each friend onto one scrollable page, and allows you an array of different views and slices. So Spokeo is useful for monitoring friends on say MySpace alone; Spokeo can do that for your all friends across the supported systems. In this way, Spokeo is like the RSS reader but evolved for the multimedia content of social systems.

And of course, Spokeo as a meta-social network is a social network itself.

The Ajaxy interface--built on top of Ruby on Rails--is kludgy in a few places. But it’s not bad and on par for an early stage service. They have medium term funding and are hiring programmers and engineers to ramp up.

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