My online life: facebook, myspace, mobileme, blogger, twitter, wordpress, iweb, googlemail, yahoo, flickr, picasa, ......what to choose?

I have for a while now been looking at the various options for utilising the web and all its tools to provide a unified solution for 'my online presence'. Given that I'm now working with Web 2.0 companies quite closely through my new role as AFC at a venture capital firm, it only makes sence that I leverage some of my knowledge to streamline that process.

But why streamline at all? Why do I need a presence?...

Image via Wikipedia

A few reasons really...there are some really useful online tools for helping keep in touch with friends and re-acqainting myself with lost friends from various periods in my life eg. facebook. There are also really useful tools for keeping friends and family up to date with photos (thus reducing the load on the web by emailing increasingly large megabyte photos to all and sundry) eg. flickr, facebook, mobileme gallery to name but a few. There are also tools such as blogger.com, wordpress, iweb, twitter, facebook for keeping friends up to date about what you're doing in your life - a sort of perpetual Christmas circular letter. There are also various online back up services that ensure that your precious photos aren't lost in the unexpected flood! eg. 1drive, zumodrive, etc. There are also tools to help you keep a diary of your online life - ie. I often come across a service / website / online tool that I think would be useful that I want to 'bookmark' for later reference. Sometimes, I like (like now) just to put my thoughts down in writing for (for want of a better word) posterity. eg. blogger.com, wordpress.com, posterous, deepmemo, evernote.

With all of these 'assets' its very easy to become disjointed in how you actually use of the tools so that you don't waste time using different tools cross platform to achieve the same result (ie. I'm a mac user at home, a windows user at work, and a linux user on the move!). So although these are just a few initial thoughts I'm intending to document in the next few posts how I'm going about streamlining this process to take advantage of the online tools to help me achieve my 'online goals' without duplicating effort and leaving large 'holes' in various content pools across the tools I'm opting to use. I haven't yet achieved this non duplication of effort however hopefully as I start to document what I'm actually doing, I start to notice 'tools' that I can drop.

So where am I starting. I'm placing a lot of emphasis on the tools google has to offer and firefox as the browser of choice. Why, google offers mail, blogging accounts, online document creation / editing / storing, offline access for some of its 'modules'. Why firefox, I've used it for a while, has good 3rd party add-ins (ubiquity, zemanta, gears, evernote), is fairly quick and works across mac, windows, and linux.

So how best to start. I've got my googlemail account sorted, I've enabled my blogger account, turned on Ubiquity, kicked in Zemanta, set up twitter (see right), got my mobileme account, got my facebook account, set up offline access through firefox, started my work blog through wordpress, turned on my personal blog through blogger (aka google it seems) and I'm ready to go.

Lets surf!

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