From the Inside Out

Each night I log-in to the wonderful world of the Internet. Sometimes it’s to catch up with friends online or find something to entertain me; other times it’s to locate interesting fodder to write about in my blog. When I go online, there are a few sites I love. Since you’re supposed to share the things you love with your friends, here are my five faves:

• Hulu.com — yes, I’ve written about the virtues of Hulu before, but it’s worth mentioning again, especially now that there’s nothing good to watch on TV except Burn Notice. Hulu lets you watch your favorite shows online for free. The site also offers a variety of older movies for viewing. For more info, check out my previous post, “Nothing on TV?”.
• FaceBook — it’s the ultimate social networking space. Here you can waste countless hours connecting with friends, family, and people you haven’t spoken to in years. I’ve reconnected with friends from college and high school on FaceBook, and it allows me to stay in touch with close friends even when I’m really busy. There are also countless applications, games and surveys to keep you busy — if you’re into that type of thing.
• TripAdvisor — are you planning a Summer vacation? Don’t do it without TripAdvisor. It’s the ultimate vacation guide because it offers real reviews from real travelers. I don’t go anywhere without checking TripAdvisor first. It can help you determine the best location to stay, and the reviews will tell you if a hotel property is really as good as it looks on the website.
• Google Reader — this is my favorite RSS reader. It aggregates the RSS feeds from various news sources and blogs one place so I can easily read all of them without having to go to multiple sites. It even has a widget for iGoogle enabling me to read it from my Google home page — love it!
• CNN.com — this is one of my favorite sources for news stories and articles. The site displays stories from various news sources, and it offers a good variety of US, World, Political, Entertainment, Science, Health and Business news.

If you participate in multiple social media communities (i.e MySpace, Facebook, Orkut), you know how much of a hassle it is to keep up with all of them. You must log-in to each site, manage separate friends lists, comments, updates, etc. It’s time consuming and annoying.

What if one site could manage all of your communities? That’s what Power.com attempts to do, and I must say they are doing a great job. I’ve been using their site all week, and I love it. It aggregates my separate communities together into one site making it easy to keep things up-to-date. For the first time, I don’t have to jump from site to site to synchronize or view content, messages and friends across Facebook and MySpace.

How Does It Work?
It’s quite simple. You login using your Facebook or MySpace id/password and then register all of your social networks. Your Power start page shows all of your friends, messages, and content — from all your social networks, instant messengers, and email accounts — in one place. Updates, pictures of friends, messages that you’d see on Facebook show up next to ones you have on MySpace, etc. Communities, birthdays, any social network features you choose, are all arranged by people — not by website — on your Power.com start page.

Once you log on to Power.com, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters to you. You go from Power.com to your page on any one of your social networks with one click. Another click brings you to your page on another social network. One click also brings you back to Power.com, where you can simultaneously update the content of all your social pages. For example, you can browse for your latest photos or videos, pick the ones your want, and — click — make the pictures appear on any or all of your personal pages at the same time.

Messaging is especially nimble with Power.com: all your friends and messages from all sites show up in one place. You can write one message and just choose recipients, without regard to what social network or messaging provider actually reaches each friend. Power sorts it out and sends the message off to each friend via the appropriate system. If any one friend has multiple ways to exchange messages, Power lets the user choose which one to use.

Today, Power.com now supports users on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, MSN Messenger, Orkut, and YouTube. In the near future, Power will support them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Skype and other email and communication accounts.

Power.com is the world’s leading Social Inter-Networking company in the world with 5 million registered users.

Check it out by clicking here.