Lindsey's Musings

The Internet is constantly being supplied with new content for us computer-dwellers to devour but sometimes it feels like a full time job to actually stay on top of it all.  I have a constant stream of “unread” number counts constantly begging for my attention at every turn, and the fact that I recently got an iPhone hasn’t helped the situation.  Now the numbers follow me everywhere.  While my favorite papercraft blog may forgive me if I don’t view it for a couple of days, my uncle on Facebook is less than happy when I’ve let his message sit in my inbox neglected for a week.  And it’s not like I didn’t know it was there.  I even received an email notification to let me know on top of having been told in Facebook, but I’ve reached the point where those numbers and notifications have lost their urgency.  With a Gmail inbox that lets me keep everything, I’m used to big numbers and lots of unread mail and I’ve simply become numb to it all.

Well not quite. I felt bad enough a couple weeks ago to pull an “archive all” move which is basically the cleaning equivalent of just shoving it to the back of the closet.  Out of sight, out of mind right?  I’m not sure when I started letting the Internet defeat me, but I do know it’s time to turn it around and start taking charge.  It’s time to declutter my Internet life.  I plan to do this in two ways:  consolidate my intake and output points and prioritize.

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There are countless social sites that exist that one can become a part of these days but when it comes to finding those I haven’t used before, it makes for an awkward post considering my obsession with trying out betas of new tools and websites.  I’ve sometimes gone to a website and tried to sign-up only to realize that my email is already in use because at one point or another I had already taken it for a test drive.  My lack of memory can sometimes stem from the fact that these sites and tools go through some massive functionality changes and face lifts between the time they first enter beta to when they actually become popular and I hear about them again.  It is also because I will fully admit that while I love to play around with them, sometimes my time spent with them is very shallow and I try to avoid putting myself into the dilemma of “now how do I personally use this” and the even more frightening “this is really cool but I still like x and y features of [insert competitor tool/site name here].”  What is a girl to do?  Sometimes I wish I could just mash two sites together and create the ultimate solution.

There’s also the problem of a newer tool being tagged by me as “awesome” but it relies on other people I know using it and they are already entrenched in the databases of other websites serving generally the same purpose.  The good news is that one can often find ways of doing something once, and having it propagated to all these different sites like Facebook and Twitter.  TweetDeck is a good example of this which lets you simultaneously post to both.  I think it’s important to remember though, that just because it has been made easy to reach out to the users of these different sites in one click, you may not want to use the sites in the same way and if you really want to take an interest, you’re also going to have to be able to monitor responses which is another whole different beast to tackle.

So what sites would I like to try, revisit or perhaps use better than what I currently am doing now?  Well I’m glad you asked…

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