Although consolidation of information is not really the main focus of this particular blog, it seems to be a recurring theme, and one that I'd like to expand in this entry.
If you're anything like me, you're a well-connected individual. Perhaps you're over-connected, if such a state exists. You have accounts on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo 360, and Classmates, you have a photo account on flickr, you have an MSN Live account, your XBox Live account, your Twitter account, about a dozen blogs that you like to read, you have six or seven different e-mail accounts (one for work, one for personal use, one that you use to collect all your spam, one that you got for free from your new ISP, a couple older ones that you still check from time to time, and another one that you thought you might use but never really do), your current eBay auctions, and who knows what else.
If you go to each site to read all your mail and check up on what's going on with all your friends, you don't have any time left in the day to actually live your own life.
Something I recently discovered was a nifty little website called Netvibes. The Netvibes site has a vast number of widgets that you can install, and these widgets go out and scrape all the important information from all your favorite websites for you. A couple years ago, I started work on a project to accomplish this very same task, but the job that the folks at Netvibes have done is far superior to anything I had imagined, so I will scratch that development item off my rainy day list.
I'm really not doing the site justice in this little review, but I can tell you that it's quickly earning its place in my daily top 10 page views, and may possibly become my new default home page. (This is a huge thing for me.... iGoogle has been my home page for as long as I can remember.)
With all my e-mail going straight to my phone, and this awesome web service, I'm quickly finding that I spend far less time surfing, and have more time to do other things. Maybe sleep will be one of them soon.
