I need to get out more.

My sleeping habits are CRAP. Because I was not able to sleep one wink last night, I immediately crashed when I got home from work today around 6:30pm. So now, I've been awake since 2:30am fiddling around with my online ephemera and things. One of the more interesting things that I've come across are places that aggregate all (or hopefully most of) these things in one place. I'll elaborate more about those places at the end, but here's a list of places that I maintain online profiles with:

• Friendster - My first online social networking sight. A lot of my college classmates from the Philippines are on here. This is pretty much dead so I don't check it often.
• MySpace - I have over 900 friends here. Do I know all of them? Of course not. This sight has mainly evolved into a place where I can keep up with a lot of my dj and club music interests.
• Facebook - Social networking for me today. It seems that this is the place where everyone has moved to. The whole giving receiving and giving gifts thing can be kind of addictive.
  
• Flickr - A photo uploading sight. It's not merely just a place where you upload your digital pictures, but more of a image sharing place. You have the option of uploading via your phone for those instant 'photo blogs' whenever you feel compelled.
  
• Picassa - Another photo uploading sight. Now this is where you just dump your pix. LOL.
• Blogger - Well, duh ... this is my BLOG. 'Nuff said.
• Del.icio.us - Social bookmarking? I haven't really got the hang of this. I simply use this to save random bookmarks that I can access anywhere. You can tag your entries to help you search for them at a later date. I hide my naughty ones. LOL.
• Google Reader - Blog reader. It's no doubt that I'm a blog whore. Although many blogs incorporate special stylistic formatting and imagery, it can get quite cumbersome clicking through them one by one. This helps me shuffle through it all especially all of the remix blogs where I download a lot my music from. This link shows specific posts that I find interesting enough to share with others.
• Last.fm - Social networking via musical tastes. I'm still trying to figure this one out. This sight compiles what you listen to (via iTunes) and groups you into neighborhoods with others that have similar music tastes.
• iLIke - Similar to Last.fm. I dunno -- I just have the plug-ins added to my iTunes and they compile lists of songs I play, etc. Just like Last.fm, it uses cross links to help you find where to see these artists play live, etc.
• Twitter - Status updates du jour. You can give up to the minute updates of what you are doing at any giving time in 140 characters or less. You also have the option to update via the web or through the phone.
• YouTube - Viral video anyone? Thank goodness I haven't really ventured into the world of video blogging. Even for me, I think that's just a little too involved to get into. Anyway -- you can customize your own page via YouTube with your own uploaded videos, etc. This comes in handy when you want to blog about stuff and show video about it. Go figure. LOL.
• Utterz - Audio / Video / Images / Text all bundled into one. You can send audio postings on the fly via your cell-phone. This one allows you to cross-post through many of the services listed here. I totally forgot about this one and haven't posted anything since last year.
  
• Placefave - the easiest way to keep track of and share the places you love with friends and family. This one is quite simple yet really cool. You can post up to 12 'places' that you like to visit, eat at, hang out, etc. It comes with direct access to Google Maps to help you plan your visits.

Now that's a lot of stuff, huh? As I look back at the list, I'm actually kind of scaring myself. You're probably also saying, "You need a life Mike!" Well, believe it or not, aside from totally feeding my obsessive compulsive behaviors to their max, I actually like doing this stuff. But yes, I really do need to get out more. As mentioned earlier, I found a couple of places that help bundle up a lot of these together yet distinctly compile a cool picture about myself and my interests. Both still post feeds of my blog and a lot of the sights mentioned above, but each one has a few features and benefits that are slightly different from one another.

Swurl



Tumblr

I'll play with both of these for a while as some of the things that I do and say overlap and ultimately get duplicated in their daily listings and updates. The cool thing about the Swurl application is that you can make direct comments to each individual posting in Swurl itself. Tumblr, however, is like a micro-blogging sight where you can simply post videos, music, general links, quotes, etc. instead of full-on blogs. Any commenting or replies need to be done directly in the originating site.