Similar ideas have been posed a CH, including myself.
The trick: somebody needs to have the guts to do it.
Tommy

I'm not sure how cooperative the big sites would be, given that each wants to be THE site that everyone uses and hence sees each of the others as potential competition for users.
On the other hand, I don't know how cooperative you'd need them to be... you'd have to research how easy it would be to pull information from them via a third-party site. Oh, and their terms and conditions and legal view of such things, of course...

PhilipH, I don't think they could stop you though. I don't think Hotmail likes being the transfer mechanism for untold viruses and spam (via account scraper phishing sites), so I'm pretty sure what-is-new feeds could easily be scraped from just about any social networking site.

But... I haven't seen one site I'd trust all my Web 2.0 account information to. I think it would have to offer something beyond just consolidation of feeds.

But the next social networking site (with yet another feature we can't fathom yet) will QUITE LIKELY WANT such a scraping tool to help make their site more attractive to new members.

If its feasible, I think this is a fantastic idea!

Not a bad idea. The RSS portions would be easy to grab, so would some of the standard info.

Nobody in their right mind would submit their user names and passwords to all their personal stuff to a Web site, no matter how trusted you were.

With the Facebook API, you should be able to create a Google widget or a Vista widget that does much of this; might be worth thinking through an implementation along those lines, though that implementation would also be difficult to monetize.

Tough to keep up with the trends....

Also, I wonder if people who actively participate in a bunch of social network sites have a real life to get back to, or if they'd rather just spend all day on the computer?

versions of this idea...

http://www.myquire.com/login
http://www.diigo.com/
http://www.bebo.com/

ingenious if you could do this

it is a great idea.

This is one of the best idea I have heard of I don't know if such a product already exist (probably) though. Those social site a really important to the crowd that are using them, and with all those emerging new sites it is hard to choose, myspace is still the standard but things change! I think this is a good idea because this is what's popular right now, you better act while the cake is still hot!:)

Currently, market research companies have a service where they provide participants of surveys or focus groups with branded items of the companies for whom they are doing the research. Perhaps, your idea can become a tool for those companies as it might make it more cost effective for them to do the research.

An alternative is that your site finds the right 'celebrities' who want to show the goods of your company and get reimbursed for that similar to the branding that some people put on their car. Then the purpose of the site becomes a qualification tool for finding the passionate evangelist that will promote the brand. There are many options in this scenario. Be happy to work on it with you.

I would sign up to help program this.... I have the guts :) Of course that opinion might change once I fiend out "Tom" the founder of myspace doesn't want to be my friend any more because I am stealing his traffic a page views.....

Hmm... This isn't particularily hard to do with existing apps such as mashable or correlate.us, where is the business model?