Greetings NXT readers, my name is Calvin Gilbert and I am writing a blog post for Justin while he is away.

I use to log in, post my status and accept friend requests on four different social networking sites one at a time. I can honestly say, I lost three to four hours a day checking to see if I had new friends on Facebook or what others were doing on Twitter. Once you master these free tools, social networking becomes painless and productive.

ping.fm

ping.fm is a website service I use to post to social networking sites. Basically, I log in and write my status then hit "ping it". The website will then distribute my status update to my social network sites. What drew me to this site first, was the easy navigation and clean layout. As an added bonus, this service can be accessed from your phone to update on the run.

If you belong to three or more social networking sites, and hate constantly updating them one by one, definitely incorporate ping.fm into your social posting routine.

Digsby

I use Digsby to monitor all of my social network sites. Digsby is a download available from Digsby's website, and gives a great overview of what is happening on facebook, twitter, and myspace. An definite plus is, you can link all of your email accounts and instant messaging names to truly make it an all in one application.

The best parts of Digsby is the pop up notification balloon so I do not have to continually check my social sites or email, and it allows me to chat with my facebook friends directly from the Digsby application.

I admit, Digsby can be a little overwhelming to set up, where it has 100's of bells and whistles thrown at you like color, sound and account options. But once I got it up and running, I never had to log in to a social network site or my email until it told me I had to.

Hope this helps keep social networking fun and make it easier for everyone. What other types of sites and applications do you use?

Calvin Gilbert is a graphic designer / web developer from Portland, and posts regularly to his blog www.calvingilbert.com and on Twitter.