Sites Help Organize Your Online Social Life

Slowly but surely, my online life has spiraled out of control.

Between posting photos on Flickr, updating my status on Facebook, blogging and commenting on and perusing various other sites, I'm having trouble keeping all my activities straight. And keeping track of what my friends are up to on the Web gets even harder.

But there is a way to keep it all together: lifestreaming sites. These online destinations offer a panoramic view of what you and your friends are doing on social media sites.

If you've used Facebook, you're familiar with how it offers a running list of "feeds" detailing your friends' activities: which programs they've added to their Facebook profiles, for example, and which new people they've connected with. Lifestreaming sites are a supercharged version of that. They aggregate information not only about what you and your friends are up to on Facebook, but all over the Web as well.

I tested several of these sites to see whether they would help me get organized. It turns out lifestreaming is useful, though definitely not for everyone.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is an easy-to-use starting point for organizing your Web life and sharing your thoughts about it with other people.

FriendFeed can gather updates from dozens of social Web sites, making it simple to arrange Twitter posts, Gmail Chat status updates and other online tidbits in one profile.

I also wanted to use FriendFeed to collect all of my friends' activities. This was simplified by the site's option to search my Gmail address book for FriendFeed users.

Feeds on the site were not that visually appealing - basically long lists with small icons that indicated the sites my friends and I were using, and links to extended posts we had written. If someone posted photos to Flickr, thumbnails linked to the larger photos would show up in the feed.

But the feeds still made it much easier to see everybody's Twitter updates, blog posts, Flickr uploads and more.

Also, the site has a neat feature that lets you organize friends into groups.

Privacy is probably not your top concern if you're using FriendFeed, but you can limit the visibility of your account with a simple click under "Account."

Profilactic

People looking to funnel the most social Web content onto one site may like Profilactic.

The site can tap into almost 200 social media sites, which run the gamut from social review site Yelp to ones I had never heard of, such as TwitPic, which lets you share images on Twitter.

Aggregating all these activities through Profilactic can definitely cut down on social media site surfing time, and it was easy to set up my personal "Lifestream" with sites I frequent. But it often took longer to load content about my friends than on the other lifestreaming sites I tried, which was irritating.

However, I liked that Profilactic was smart about mining the lists of friends I have on some other sites.

One downside: I couldn't find any way to make my Lifestream private. This may turn off some potential users.

Swurl

Though it can't gather information from as many sites as FriendFeed or Profilactic, Swurl's looks set it apart.

The site was my favorite in part because of its very clever "Timeline" feature, which let me see all my online activities on one page, organized into a calendar-like grid. I could then click each square of the grid to see details, like the full text of a review of a bar I wrote on Yelp, or larger versions of photos I had uploaded to Flickr.

Unfortunately, Swurl doesn't have the same option for viewing my friends' activities. Instead, they show up as a long "Friends" feed, similar to those on Profilactic and FriendFeed.

Swurl supports Facebook and Twitter and a variety of blogging platforms like TypePad, Tumblr and WordPress.

Swurl also automatically scanned the sites I was monitoring to recognize activities by the contacts I had stored on those sites, and placed them into my "Friends" feed.

These automatic additions were useful, because Swurl does not have a user-search function that lets you find and add friends through the site.

Also, users should keep in mind that information you share on Swurl is publicly available to those who know your handle on the site.