Social networking has brought us our friends and family much closer, but has brought other issues. Apart from enabling you to see what your friends have been up to from day-to-day (and some people love this) and feeling somewhat obliged to keep up, the biggest issue is that one friend may be using Facebook, whereas another may choose Digg. Whilst a couple of friends are using Windows Live Messenger, others may be using Yahoo Messenger.

Luckily there are a few cross-network chat applications, such as Pidgin or Trillian, which will enable you to chat to other users, whether they have a Live Messenger or Yahoo account. If they use Skype, that’s another problem entirely as Skype won’t allow other software to utilise their network.

From a social networking perspective, there are few tools that bring together the different services and enable you to see, from one interface, the latest news, photos and files from other users. Eventbox is a tool for your Mac that enables you to bring together Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Flickr and more, so you streams from each network within the one application. Of course, you need an account with each network.

As Eventbox is a Mac tool, it’s very well designed. There’s also an iPhone version in development.