At some point last week Adam Stiles the developer behind LinkRiver; another aggregator site, sent me along an invitation to have a look at his creation and play around with it for awhile. During that time and now as I have been dealing with other issues I had a quick look through and kept an eye on the press building up around the site.

Typical of sites of the same type of service; with maybe the exception of iminta, LinkRiver has the same clean and simple to use user interface which makes it fairly simple to get up and running with it. Which really doesn’t involve all that much other than filling in a very basic profile settings.

Invariably lines of comparison are going to be drawn between LinkRiver and FriendFeed since they both offer the same basic idea - the aggregation of all your information entry points on the Internet. Where FriendFeed is built more around your involvement in building out your profile contact points of both friend and information points of contact along with the ability to have conversations at any point within those information flows LinkRiver goes for an even more minimalist approach.

The one thing that LinkRiver has added though that gives it a one up on FriendFeed (for now) is your Attention section. In this section LinkRiver lists both your most shared sites as well as your most shared keywords. While the Shared Sites is kind of a cool idea I’m not sure about the Shared Keywords since it they only link back to stories you have posted. I think an added benefit would be to be able to tie them in with something like Technorati tags. That I think would give some real added value to the feature.

On the whole I still like FriendFeed much more than I do LinkRiver. That isn’t to say that I don’t like LinkRiver - I just find it less useful for me at this point. That said though I do think that it could be an excellent mobile service specifically because of its clean bare bones approach for displaying its data. In this LinkRiver has done a very good job on its user interface but for the time being it is just another service I’ll be keeping an eye as it moves forward.

Conversation Tags: aggregators, LinkRiver, FriendFeed