Managing your E-Life

Its May 16th, 2009 and while the rest of the world slumbers in anticipation for their next day, I want to take this opportunity to talk about an internet problem that has become a common problem for many people that I know and interact with on a daily basis ... How in the world do I manage all the sites that I work with everyday?

The most common sites that people visit on a daily basis will range from Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, etc. down to your favorite Football club playing in a remote location in Africa. Yes, the internet has become that large and it seems that everyone wants a piece of the pie. The answers are multitudenous as the effort to manage one's E-Life becomes more complex. People have resorted to RSS and Twitter to stay on top of the game while some other people have decided to write portlets that they push out as XML on services like iGoogle that allow portals to manage your mail, news, etc. I for one have tried a few solutions and to be honest, no one solution really offers everything I need. Is it simply because the services I want to have integrated just aren't all availible in one tiny box? Or is it more related to the fact that there is just too much to digest in one sitting?

The most common application features one would need should contain the following features.

• Regular notifications of whats going on
• Site updates
• Chat functionality
• Message reading functionality
• Ability to latch onto sites and pull information based on Groups/Forums as RSS Feeds (Still haven't found an application that does this yet)
• In-built picture management (Still haven't found an application that does this yet)

Someone out there is going to read this and say "I think that's literally impossible" but the real truth is there are tons of applications out there today that perform most of the basic functionality already listed with some modifications on how they handle each of them. The smartest way I have found to manage everything is to simply integrate everything as extensions in Firefox. While this might not be good for all those other browser users, I find that Firefox actually offers a certain level of neatness in its approach to handling extensions and the support and on-going improvement with the evolution of E-Societies is handled rather well.

Whatever your choice is, just remember, if it has everything you need in it don't take that as a sign that you have found the application to end all your worries. Chances are the service your working with is growing in the background and the application developers are not able to meet all your needs. Off I go to spend the first thirty minutes of my day checking posts.

Music while writing this blog - Here Comes The Sun - The Beatles

Mood - Optimistic (It's Friday)

Favorite Technology at the moment - XML