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.

How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds, and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item?

Although I am pretty organized, sometimes even my organization skills need a little help. A company in San Francisco, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, which may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents. How?

Twine can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize. Then it does something remarkable: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.

They can make their collections, or “twines,” private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or Technology, or even make the twines public. For instance, people planning a trip to Japan (something I would like to do) could send all the Google maps, articles, and travel guide Web pages they are collecting to Twine. As each document is added, Twine automatically tags items and adds them to the database for the trip, compiling an index with references.

Twine’s organizational abilities have enthused excitement among some early users, and quite a few people are on the waiting list to try it out, I am sure. Unfortunately, it is still in private beta, but they are gradually opening up invitations accordingly. The site will be free to regular users, although there may be premium content as well, to keep finances high. Additional features and services will most likely be for a cost and supported through advertisements in the meantime.

Although Twine is focusing on teams and professionals, Twin does not deny individuals the ability to have a little fun too. With the help of Taskbin combined with Twine, I think you may have the ultimate organization tools regardless whether or not you are a professional or part of a team.

So many people get gift cards over the holiday season. Around this time, they are still using or have the gift cards just waiting to be used. Gift cards are popular items to give, and yet many cards remain unredeemed. The end result serves well for companies, but for you the consumer, you’re out of luck. There is still hope though, and ways to organize, keep track of, and spend, your precious gift card.

Leverage aims to even out the playing field, giving consumers a way to manage, trade, and keep track of your gift cards. Register your gift cards on site to monitor the spending amount left on each one. Leverage also allows you to buy gift cards or swap them out for something else.

In their own words:

“Leverage was developed to reduce the increasing hassles involved with managing gift cards and loyalty and rewards programs, and also to help consumers reduce the retail SPAM and clutter that they have to deal with on a daily basis. Unlike many other services that only do a fraction of what we do, it’s completely free. Creating an account takes less than one minute and gives you access to a wide-range of features.”

I like the idea and currently have a few cards (which I got as gifts) registered on the site. The site is super simple to use, and just so useful. Leverage helps consumers get the most out of their gift cards. Rather than having them expire, unused, users can keep track of all the money left on the cards, and therefore rest assured that they are getting the most use they can from each card.

The service is free and only sends those annoying marketing emails to your Leverage account only, not you personal email box. So if you have some gift cards laying around, go ahead and register!

For me, organizing life online is more of a mental task than an actual effort, but going about the routine of checking all the spots I regularly visit only to find no updates can get pretty old pretty fast. With Bubbletop, I no longer have to do that.

Bubbletop aims to simplify digital life by allowing you to build your ideal view of the Web. It’s really simple—all you do is add the feeds to the places you want to keep tabs on and Bubbletop will add them. This allows you to instantly view everything in one place. You can organize your feeds into separate tabs to keep related sites together, define how many items you want displayed at a time, and customize the look of each. Feeds can be shared and kept public so everyone can receive recommendations for new places they might like, and you can keep any of your subscriptions private. Additionally, Bubbletop lets you know what the most popular feeds are, so you always have easy access to what’s hot at the moment. And, of course, you can keep in touch with and invite contacts so you can share your feeds with ease.
What I like best about Bubbletop is its simplistic beauty. The site is simple and clean, the interface is easy to use and easy on the eyes, and the system works well. I can stay up to date with several of the places I frequent without ever leaving the Bubbletop site, and I only see what I want to see. It also has a Firefox plug-in to make adding new content even easier.
Bubbletop, a product of Orange, is currently in the alpha testing phases and is invite only, but getting an invite shouldn’t be too difficult. Check it out at bubbletop.com and start simplifying your digital life.