Thread: Streamline your social sites

Social networking is great for keeping tabs on your friends, but what about all the time you sink into it? The effort you devote to social networks can consume your day faster than you can pick up pals on Facebook. Here are seven ways to make your experience less complex. Digsbyis excellent for aggregating your entire online social life; wrapping social networking, IM, and e-mail into one tight little'
package. This multitasking download integrates AIM, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and tons more, all from the comfort of one unified system tray application.

For people who want to know where their friends (or kids) happen to be ae any given minute of the day, Goog!e Latitude acts like a Lo Jack for their loved ones.


Accessible from your cell phone or browser, Latitude displays where all your friends are located on a Google Map.

It's always exciting to see that someone has written a comment on your Facebook wall, but if you're tasked with doing actual work at some point during the day,
the deluge of e-mail notifications from social networks can be a huge time sink. NutshellMai! consolidates messages from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and sec-
ondary e-mail accounts into one scheduled digest, so you can get a snapshot of your popularity Rather than managing profile information, (registration required) is all about managing your status.



Set this service up with your Facebook and Twitter accoulltl"-; for example, and a single update automatically posts a new status update on Facebook as well as a new tweet to Twitter. Multiply that function by more than 30 supported social networking sites, and you could save some serious.

Interested in hunting down your college roommate, or perhaps a long-lost love? People search engine Pip! scours the Web to find every last fingerprint that the person you're seeking has ever left behind online, down to every photo, address, and blog post it can unearth. Pipl even supports reverse people lookups bye-mail address, user name, and phone number.

Social networks have turned cyberstalking into a national pastime, but who has time to check all the possible places your crush may be socializing online? Web service SpokeD (registration required) searches the farthest corners of 41 social networking sites to uncover the deep, dark secrets of your friends and loved ones. We hope that you're proud of yourself.

If you're nuts for the popular social networking and microblogging service Twitter, you've probably outgrown using Twitter's Web interface to write and track tweets. TweetDeck is a no-cost download that puts Twitter on steroids, letting you easily track particular search terms, group your friends, shrink unwieldy URLs, and more, all from one centralized window.