A few months ago, I wrote a post on Yahoo adopting OpenID. In it, I wondered,

Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself? Is my integrated online service portal only as smart as I am?

Well, this week, in further online consolidation news, Xoopit, a San Francisco-based company, has announced this week that they’ve developed software that turns your Gmail into a social environment.

GIGAOM has a great article on  the launch and what it means for social networking. The article’s author argues that,

 If you take two of the more popular social networks — Linked In (professional) and Facebook (personal) –- as examples, the amount of email generated by these systems (if you don’t want to spend your entire day logged into them, that is) is astounding.

So it stands to reason that if you could develop hooks to various social services from within your email inbox, your entire experience would be much easier to manage. This is Xoopit’s approach. It’s launching a Firefox plug-in that basically looks through your GMail and automatically imports information from major photo and video services such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly and Picasa Web.

In other words, if you receive a URL link from one of your friends via an email, the photos appear in what’s essentially a gallery view. Similarly, you can share your photo and video galleries with your address book contacts without making your friends go to different sites; simply clicking on a photo rearranges the layout of GMail to offer you the option to share. (Check out the gallery of screenshots.)

I’ve been doing some more thinking on this idea of consolidation online information. I use an rss feeder every day. I find it extremely convenient to track the ten or twenty sites I would normally visit most often and I enjoy not having to keep track of when my favorite podcasts get updated. There’s real value in being able to get all this information in one space.

But, and this goes back to go back to my post on Yahoo, I feel like consolidating everything into one  spot means I’m somehow missing something. It seems somehow that the more I become accustomed to having of my information brought to my digital doorstep, the more I feel information is slipping through my grasp. Then again, maybe I’m just paranoid; maybe I never would have found the information to begin with.