The current state of the Internet is a confusing one. When Web 2.0 emerged, it was all about creating profiles, making friends and conveying your personality to as many people as possible. Now, the constant introduction of services and the growing number of profiles any given person holds is getting overwhelming. Aggregation services like FriendFeed for profiles and Techmeme for news try to help wade through this mess — but in my opinion, have only created more noise.

Originally, I saw FriendFeed as a great tool: it aggregates a ton of services (such as YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, Google Reader, etc.) making it easy to find content created by you and your friends in one feed. Twitter integration on FriendFeed also allows for easy posting and commenting on tweets between friends. The ultimate goal of this service is to become a one-stop shop for all of your social networking needs, but it just doesn’t do it for me.

One reason is that FriendFeed’s interface is all but appealing and useful. Items are streamlined into a continuous page of updates with no easy way to filter out particular services or a specific number of updates from each person.

Last week, Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch pointed out Twhirl’s new FriendFeed integration. Desktop applications appeal to many who prefer pop-up notifications to living in their browser. One can go about their work, while updates run automatically. But these applications fail when update bubbles completely take over your computer, impeding on your ability to focus on other tasks. Twhirl was recently acquired by Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic and now not only supports Twitter updates and FriendFeed but also video conversation. Is the goal to stuff as many conflicting and competing services as possible into one desktop application?

If all of this nonsense didn’t make me bitter enough, let’s take a look at Facebook Chat. I want to preface this by saying that I’ve visited Facebook significantly less often over the past few weeks due to a more and more stagnant news feed. This leads me to believe my friends are also not using the site as often as they used to. Yesterday, their chat service, which has been tested on a few networks, was rolled out to all of Facebook. When you are on the site, an active buddy list of online friends is always present at the bottom of the page.

Michael Arrington recently bragged about the number of chats inundating his browser when he accidentally left Facebook open for the evening. Don’t get me wrong; I find the service to be extremely impressive in its functionality and the ability it affords one to connect with friends whom they don’t have on their other buddy lists. The problem is that this is ANOTHER buddy list to keep track of. I’ve used AIM for years, and eventually started using Google Talk because so many people are on Gmail these days, but I really have no interest in adding Facebook Chat into the mix. Also, the lack of buddy lists and privacy controls seriously concerns me. You can’t hide yourself from certain friends; you’re just either online or offline.

The list of aggregation services continues to grow — Socialthing! immediately comes to mind and Chirp which was announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo looks very promising by providing both Windows and Mac clients and a screensaver view. Bright minds and innovation will constantly bring new products to users but when is it too much? Should developers focus on building onto one service such as Twitter or continue to introduce competitors in hopes of attaining their own market share?

Looking forward to Web 3.0, users will find themselves creating more and more data on the web and developers will build easier ways to manage these expansions. The desktop computing experience will eventually evolve into the web based computing experience and it is essential that services start cutting the noise to avoid an overflow of information which will eventually lead to a need for more and more bandwidth and faster processing power; Moore’s Law at its finest. With internet service providers growing fearful of managing the incredible consumption of bandwidth, and considering creating restrictions including more complicated pricing structures, the future looks a bit opaque.