Online Media Cultist

I’m not talking about diamonds and greenbacks and mink stoles (e-mink stoles?) or even corporately valuable documents and business silos of data and such, but about the ever burgeoning amount of web addresses, login/usernames, passwords, PINs, codes, and on and on that are necessary to support our modern online life.

I’d bargain that an increasingly annoying eater of wasted time (there should be some kind of metric for this) involves sitting in front of a typical login screen (take your pick, from online banking to shopping to social networking to blogging to gaming and back around again) while one’s face becomes redder and angrier and steamier as a message is returned again and again that says something to the effect of: Sorry, your username and/or password is forgotten and/or lost to the e-winds.

One of my geekier obsessions is content and information aggregation. There should (and likely is) a great solution out there, a simple web-based interface that simply and elegantly gathers all the maelstrom of usernames, passwords, and, well… crap that’s needed to get things accomplished online nowadays.

I’ll walk through my own personal journey and current (so so) solution with the hope that some cutting edge folk out there know about something better. A perfect comment to this piece, therefore, would be: Haven’t you been using flibberjibber.info (or some such), it saved my life back in the day (read = Christmas, 2006), n00b!

Phase One: I tried to remember stuff
This didn’t work out so well, as you might imagine.

Phase Two: I tried to write stuff down
This yielded marginally better results, though I ran into the age old problem of having to remember where I wrote stuff down. Since I’m typically online in one of several locations throughout the day, the problem became having to remember where my stuff was written down at any given time.

Phase Three: I got (sort of) organized
Finding 37 Signals was a great help. I used Backpack for a spell as a way to organize lists and information. It worked fairly well, but at the time the interface was a little bit clunky and glitchy (this was back in the spring of ‘05, so I imagine it’s much improved by now), so I abandoned it and slipped back to Phase Two befuddlement for a spell.

In early 2006, I moved onto Basecamp, another 37 Signals product. It’s basically very simple project management software, in the best possible sense (anyone familiar with the term chronogram will know what I mean!). The great thing about 37 Signals is that they try to KISS (keep-it-simple-smarty).

So I now use Basecamp’s writeboard feature as a general dump for all the URLs (including multiple social networking profiles, work-related login information, blogging software tools, etc.) I need in my day-to-day online experience. No matter what computer I’m in front of, I can easily login to one website (allowing me to simply remember one web address and password instead of dozens!) and gather all of the information I need at any time.

Some things that used to drive me batty are now much easier to deal with. A great example is Wine Country Gift Baskets, an absolutely stellar place to find gifts and quickly ship them to anywhere in the country. However, they force you to provide a unique customer ID of their own choosing that is an eight- or nine-digit number. Basecamp has provided me with a way to continue to utilize this service without losing the last remnants of my sanity.

However, I’m convinced that something better is out there or in the process of being developed. I’d like to be able quickly search the first few letters of “My URLs” (or whatever) to instantly bring up the web address, login information, and password that can aid me in plugging into and out of the wild array of websites and interfaces that make up a typical day online.

Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington announced the “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” for 2007 today. The list of 15 web services – including Digg, Flickr, Gmail, Skype, Techmeme, Wordpress, and YouTube – is interesting as a collection in several ways.

My first thought is that while most of these services didn’t exist two or three years ago, they really are indispensable to the daily life of many web users as 2007 dawns. And that’s striking because it shows you what a flattening force technology (and “web 2.0″ as its modern Internet equivalent) really is. I can look at the list and know that I use many of the same information-gathering and communications tools as “influential tech blogger Michael Arrington,” for instance.

If e-mail was one of the Internet’s earliest (and some might still argue only) “killer apps,” I agree with Mr. Arrington that Gmail is just about its perfect web-based incarnation. The ability to tag messages (you can put label a message however you like and have it saved to multiple folders), instant refreshing (messages pop up without you having to do anything), and threaded messaging make it an essential everyday tool.

Two of the selections – Amie Street and Pandora – are music related. I’ve intrigued by a service called eTunes of late, which has kind of an “early beta” look to it but is a really easy way to gather music online and then stream it at will.

While I think that Digg is probably the best current incarnation of the new breed of “social news” sites (though I think the future lies with hybrid models spearheaded by the Netscape, a meshing of an editor- and user-controlled experience), I’m partial to Reddit because of its simplicity and the mere fact that it casts its net to a range of stories that I happen to find interesting. Reddit’s innovation to allow users to vote stories “down” may actually be its worst feature as it encourages active news submitters to vote stories down. However, voting comments down, which Reddit employed before Digg added the feature, is great. Nothing’s more satisfying then clicking a down arrow on someone you disagree with!

While Mr. Arrington uses NetNewsGator and NetVibes to read and organize RSS feeds, I’m partial to a combination of Bloglines and RSSFwd. NetVibes, part of the new breed of “web 2.0 start pages,” is a great product but the prospect of staring at a bunch of boxes crammed with news headlines doesn’t quite work for me in general. That said, I’m nearly awed by what a super-cool product yourminis is.

The other things that I use everyday include Basecamp, project management software put out by the 37 Signals folk, and AIM for instant messaging.

What’s finally intriguing is that there is not one social networking product on Tech Crunch’s (or my!) list. I wouldn’t be surprised if this will change in the next year or two, as companies fall all over themselves developing more sophisticated social networks that cater to an older/more mature demographic and an ever wider array of specific interests and lifestyles.