The other day a ton of pointers crossed my radar (via Bloglines & Twitter, mostly) that piqued my interest. It was Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur mapping out the tools he uses to organize himself socially online. Or, more correctly, the social online tools he uses to organize himself.

Confused? So are Loic and I.

While I love Loic’s notebook – I also sport a handy Moleskine that serves double-duty as useful journal and pretentious eye-candy – I’m not so keen on his message. He’s just as burnt out and spread out by (don’t say it) Social Media, social networking, social search, social bookmarking and the ice cream social.

His point (and mine) is that the tools aren’t social enough. None of them play in each other’s pools (or if they do, they aren’t easy enough to tie together).

I’m sure most people would bring up Cluetrain or Small Pieces, but the conversations are getting harder to follow and the “loosely joined” small pieces need to be more strongly joined.

I guess I’m saying that friendfeed and socialthing aren’t enough. Or aren’t right.
iGoogle or Bloglines aren’t enough.
Shuffling, managing & organizing feeds aren’t enough.

I’ve tied myself to my browser, but now I’m committed to dozens of tabs and plugins and sidebars to keep things going.

Is centralization (as Loic posits) the answer? I don’t know but I’d be willing to try.

Is a tool like Flock the answer? I *have* tried but I didn’t *buy*.

Maybe some expansion of Google’s browser synch so I don’t lose my train of blog between session @ work and @ home, but that doesn’t address mobile.

And what about identity? How many profile pictures and witty anecdotes in “about me” sections should I have to manage.

OpenID is cool where it’s implemented.
Gravatar seems well-represented.
What else is out there?

I guess I’m just feeling stuck a little bit. Consuming too much and trying to figure out how to trim the fat and get more done.

And the recent blog presentation and my upcoming Web 2.0 presentation have me thinking about a nagging question *everyone* asks: how do I fit this into my life? And their implied rejoinder: without it becoming my life? They also want to know how to fold some of the discrete bits into the larger way *they* use the internet and I don’t always have a good answer.

Please leave a comment or condolences. I’m looking for some direction.

PS: If you’re one of the folks that wants a copy of the PPT for the blog presentation, let me know. I’m still figuring out Google Docs and I’ll have to add you to a distribution list.