Social aggregation (Digg, Twitter, Facebook oh my!) is a slightly higher rent version of technical aggregation.

Human beings are way better than computers at finding context, but are much, much worse than computers at sorting through giant, complex piles of complicated data. Honestly we have better things to do, like watch The Jersey Shore and cure Cancer.

The result is that social aggregation gives you more meaningful information from a much smaller group of sources.

You trade a little extra relevancy for a lot less diversity.

The age of the aggregator is ending.

Before you get too excited, mega-aggregators like Google aren’t going anywhere, in fact I would put money down that we are only seeing the leading edge of what Mountain View, California has in store for us.

What I am saying is that real, flesh and blood human beings don’t like non-contextual aggregation. We can’t put our heads around the idea that there are 100 billion pages and counting at our finger tips. We just don’t get it and probably never will.

Don’t get me wrong, computers love these kind of data sets because they are really easy to deal with. All the programmer has to do is point a rather stupid spider at the Internet and tell it to keep chomping away until it runs out of places to go. This is programmatically elegant but conceptually flawed.

At the end of the day, aggregation is a cheap, blunt instrument we have thrown at a complex problem and like all cheap, blunt instruments it is necessary but not sufficient.