I have been asked many times how I manage to keep track of all the social networks and services that I have. It is very difficult. Since I also review sites, I am constantly signing up for social networks or services. I think I am the only person that does not have a Myspace account, however, I suspect that many individuals are signed up for quite a few social networks themselves. Fear not! There are a few ways to keep them straight with – yes – another service, however, you will be just a little more organized. Below, I will give you five services that I have tried that are great starts to becoming more socially organized.

1. Profilactic (which sounds like a medicine to me) is a recent favorite of mine and supports Pownce, LinkedIn, Shelfari, and the ability to add more than one account for the same site. At its core, Profilactic does two things: it displays your personal lifestream, which consists of your social networking activity, and a group lifestream from your friends. What it does, it does well. There’s also the option to create clippings – bits and pieces of information from the web; but this option is not really connected to the rest of the features on the site.
2. SocialURL helps you organize your online identity and get back in touch with all of your friends and classmates. It’s a unified profile with support for photo galleries and videos, as well as a central portal with links pointing out to all your other social network profiles. It’s all spiced up with lots of additional features, like on-site email, reminders and bookmarks.
3. Naymz is not so much an organizer but helps in that the service actively monitor certain sites for mention of your name. Naymz also actively promotes your profile by trying to make it more visible on Google.
4. Second Brain takes a radically different approach to aggregation than other apps on this list. You organize your data – this includes data from your social network profiles, like Flickr photos or YouTube videos – into collections. A collection is basically a bunch of links, photos, or other bits and pieces of data thrown onto a dashboard; you can create your own collections or explore what others have collected.
5. MyLifeBrand goes a step further by really integrating various social network sites within a MyLifeBrand frame. Its a pretty great service.

All of these services will help in your quest to be a little more organized in your life online and let’s face it; They all do the same thing, however, each of them have something they do different as well. Something you may like, and something you may not like. Take a look at them all. They all strive to keep your online social life more organized and that is something many of us need these days.

If you answered yes, then I suggest you read on. Remember when I wrote about SpeedDate.com? SpeedDate is a dating site where dates are short, sweet, and one-on-one. SpeedDate.com will match you up based on some basic personality and geographical preferences.

The service is hosting what they call the “Olympic Speed Dating Competition.” What exactly daoes that entail? Do you have the looks, the charm, and all the right moves, but just not competition-ready when it comes to speed, strength, and endurance? If So, SpeedDate.com has the Olympic event for you.

Starting Tuesday, SpeedDate.com is hosting an Olympic-themed online dating competition to determine the world’s best online daters. This event will run all the way through Sunday August 24. SpeedDate will then announce the winners by offering gold, silver, and bronze metals to the men and woman who match with the most other singles.

“SpeedDate.com has millions of eligible and attractive single who’ve got the potential to be the world’s best online dater,” said Dan Abelon, co-founder of SpeedDate.com. To get in the Olympic spirit, SpeedDate will ask questions such as: If you go on a date with any athlete, who would it be? Which sport has the sexiest athletes? Which two athletes would make the best couple? Which Olympic event would you most like to compete in?

If anything, you should check out the site and look around. The site is neat, fresh, and offers you the luxury of dating from home. Brush your teeth, comb your hair, wax those eyebrows, and work on your charming, charismatic conversation in preparation for the Olympic Speed Dating Competition. It is sure-to-be an exciting event! 

I know I am young (24) so my generation definitely knows what a cell phone is and how much money it can save if we just have a cellphone and not a landline. So many people I talked to no longer have landlines these days; or either they do, but never use them. Why? I think one reason cell phones win over landlines is the simple fact that they are portable. You can get a call anywhere. No longer do you have to be tethered to a phone jack to receive a call.

It is said, “for nearly three in 10 households, people do not even bother trying to call them on a landline phone.” Most figures show they either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.  Most figures also show that dependence on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. “In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.”

It is far no surprise that these nifty, cool, little gadgets are growing, and growing quickly. Another reason why I think cell phone usage is growing is because solicitors. Cell phone users get freedom from those annoying solicitors. Families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors.

However, leaving out the poor landline can have some problems too. “The trends have an important impact on polling organizations, which rely primarily on calls to random landline phone numbers.” Calling cell phone users can be more costly for pollsters, in part because federal law forbids unsolicited calls to cell phones made by computerized dialing systems used heavily by pollsters. That is a joy to some people. I am definitely happy that I cannot get unsolicited calls to my cell.

But there is another problem — Also affected are the telephone industry and emergency service providers, who can find it harder to locate people calling from a cell phone. This can be crucial. My parents made the decision of switching to an unlimited cell phone plan and ditching the landline because they were not home. Before, they had their home phone forwarding calls to their cell phones anyway, so I could see their reasoning. More and more companies allow cell phones so it wasn’t a problem for their jobs. However, a situation that involved emergency help was delayed by the simple fact that they had nothing but a cell phone.

I searched and looked at the National Center for Health Statistics and found that out of the 13,000+ individuals they interviewed, they found some interesting findings:

-Low-income people are likelier than the more affluent to have only cell phones.

-About a third of those under age 30 only have cell phones.

-About 2 percent of households reported having no telephones

-Households with both cell and landline phones who rarely or never get calls on their landlines tend to be better educated and have higher incomes.

-Those with only cells tend to be living with unrelated roommates, renters rather than homeowners, and Hispanics and blacks rather than whites.

Of course, these finding do not apply for everyone,everywhere, and living situations, so you should not get offended, but their findings are interesting to see. I feel that, as time progresses and the sheer volume of people grow, landline may be the thing of the past, leaving us vulnerable to those polls and unsolicited phone calls. Kids these days are practically given cell phones after birth and the child grows up with the mindset that they don’t need a landline and that, my friends, is the start of a “landlineless” world.

We are partnering with SugarSync to give away a MacBook Air.  This is the sexiest laptop on the planet, so check out the contest details and enter to win over here.  Good luck.

Buxfer is an online application that allows you to maintain and manage your financial stability, along with monitoring any debts that you owe or are owed. The layout is appealing and Buxfer’s competition could soon be struggling. Following a recent alliance with the Apple iPhone, you can take advantage of what Buxfer has to offer, straight from your iPhone. This will allow you to access all of your transactions, tags, charts and even report transactions while you are on the go. Yes, you can access your bank account from your iPhone as well, but Buxfer offers more and has a simple, iPhone compatible layout enabling a more readable text size.

Venturebeat recently released a favorable article, claiming that Buxfer is giving Mint a run for its money. That is a strong statement considering that Mint was part of the Techcrunch 40 startup companies. However, I agree that Buxfer is an excellent new money management tools and seems to offer everything that its competitors offer, plus more. In addition, its super-fresh interface has much to do usability. Signing up is a breeze and importing bank information is as simple (and safe) as logging in.

TechCrunch calls Buxfer the “half brother of Billmonk” because of the product similarities. However, Buxfer does offer much more than Billmonk. TechCrunch explains that, “Buxfer is deeper than Billmonk, letting you track and tag out your expenses with friends and groups over time. Buxfer goes further, letting you analyze you expenses over time through a Google finance-style pie chart with adjustable time frame.” In my opinion, Buxfer does offer quite a lot of flexibility and even offers a peer to peer payment service. Backed by Amazon, you can collaborate with Buxfer to get the money back that your friends owe you in easy, flexible payments. While other private services are beginning to offer this, Buxfer is a well-rounded site that focuses on managing your money, income and debts as a whole.

Buxfer users are enabled to setup automatic bill reminders and repeating transactions. This is helpful for those who bookmark several bill paying sites in order to manually check bill due dates each month. Buxfer will keep track for the individual every bill that is entered into the private Buxfer account; reoccurring bills such as mortgage payments, electric bills and automobile payments.

NetBanker points out a weakness of Buxfer, claiming it has “no support for transactions”. When I signed up for the service, I did notice that I had to do a lot of manual data entering. NetBanker explains, “Other than being able to import transaction files that have been previously downloaded from banks and card issuers, it’s all manual data entry. Helper tools such as “copy”, “repeat entry” and “auto-tagging” help a bit, but to be an effective tool the service needs to integrate more closely with the actual bill and the payment.” I know that if the service is too cumbersome, then it will slowly decrease individual usage.

Overall, Buxfer made an excellent choice by making itself compatible with the iPhone. With the world’s current economic status, it is about time to take responsibility for our finances.

iPhone Fully Loaded

Debt Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About