Life Online can be very rewarding and very stressful. If you are like me you might have anywhere from 50 to even 100 sites that you are a part of, whether it be micro-blogging, social networking, video sharing, gaming or whatever. Having an online presence is as rewarding as it can be stressful and time-consuming. Do you really realize just how many sites are out there? I am constantly wondering which are the best and would it matter if I ditched a site or two (I never do though). I got started about 3 or 4 years ago and really began hitting the networking scene hard the past two years. I have a presence on many platforms including virtual worlds such as Second Life. With me it all started with MySpace and from there I was hopeless. I was and am destined to live a digital life.
Below are some popular sites. Are you familiar with these? I am and have profiles on all of these sites. Kinda sad, huh??
To maintain only 10 or 11 sites may take some time, but it would be fairly easy, right? That is if you were and are committed to putting in the time and effort.
What if we multiplied these sites by 10 or 20? Then what happens? How do we find time to update everything? What I do is try to find sites that allow me to bookmark my other sites. It turns into me having more blogs, profile and URLs than I started the day with and then I end up with social networks coming out of my *ss.
Now in all honesty I am not a member of all of these sites and there are many online communities that I am a part of that are not shown here. So the question is how do I control, handle and maintain all of these? I try the best that I can to keep a Google document of all of the sites that way once a day/week (depending on the site) I refer to the document and copy/paste
the URL into my browser. Here is an example of how I try to keep organized online.
Now this works for keeping the URLs all in one place, but what about updating them?? I have found that many sites that I am a part of, like Digg.com and Twitter, are starting to link in with Facebook. The problem with that is I Tweet a lot during the day and to have each Tweet posted to Facebook seems to get out of control. The way I see it is that if my friends on Facebook wanted to see my Tweets they would sign up for Twitter, right?
TweetDeck (a third party application) can be used for Twitter and Facebook at the same time, which is good and I can choose to post to one or the other or even both. You do have to install the application onto your computer, but I can assure you that I have never had a problem with mine.
I also found HelloTxt.com which links to all of my microblogs and a few social networking sites. I do find that the site be useful for marketing reasons because not all of my online time is just for personal use. I am lucky enough however to be able to be on the web all day long for my job and much of my professional digital life is also shared with my personal online persona. 
So when the day is done I have found that keeping all of my URLs organized is the first step to organizing your online presence after that it is up to you to find the applications and/or sites that will suit your needs and save you time. Perhaps one day someone will create something that will link to all popular sites and with the click of the mouse all 100 can be updated. Until then I will keep on updating my way.
Oh and if I happen to find new ways to make this process easier I will let y’all know.
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