-Phil

I didn't take the time to explain my first Posterous post all that well (I was too busy working on the illustration), so I'll do it now.

I saw the existence of Posterous for the first time today — well, now that it's past midnight, yesterday. And I only found Posterous because I happened across Tweetdeck today. Tweetdeck is a nice iPhone Twitter application (as far as I can tell from a half day of use) and uses Posterous for a blog.

Now, I've already got a Blogger account and a Tumblr account that I don't use. Why would I need a Posterous account? I also questioned why I would need Tweetdeck on my iPhone when I already have Twitterific, and well, Twitter. But, for some reason, I liked how simple and connected Posterous seemed, and I thought I might actually get some use out of it by posting crap like this. Also, I can already tell that I'm not going to miss anything by deleting Twitterific from my phone.

All that thinking got me thinking about how many online accounts I have actually created in my lifetime. You see, I'm old enough to have typed up school papers on a Smith Corona. My first programming endeavor was inputing code from the back of 3-2-1 Contact Magazine to play a river raft game on a tape-drive Commodore 64. My first Mac experiences were painting pixel by pixel in ClarisDraw and setting all my reports in Dom Casual 12pt. with double-spacing in ClarisWorks on a Macintosh Quadra. And, it wasn't until my first week at Iowa State that I got an email address. That, in effect, was my first ever online account.

So I started a list to see how many different websites/services I currently have online accounts for. The list is definitely not finished, and the number is already over 40. Typing that number doesn't alarm me as much as reading the list does.

Many accounts I don't use at all anymore, or at most, hardly ever. I log into Friendster probably twice a year just to see if anything has changed. I tried to check out MySpace again recently, but unfortunately, most people's spaces are still pretty cluttered, ugly, and static. My LycosMail (formerly Eudoramail, which I loved mostly because of the illustration [by the way, this is one of the only pictures I can find of it on the web]) email is only used as a signup for things like TeamSarah.org and Hungarian stock photo sites.

Anyway, I'm rambling, and it's bedtime, so I'll wrap it up.

I've left breadcrumbs all over the internet — many more than some people, many less than others. Some paths have almost been completely gobbled up by the forest creatures, like Eudoramail. And other paths, like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr have started crossing over each other so many times that I may never be able to find my way back out of the forest. So, I'm taking Mitch Hedberg's advice: "If you get lost in the woods, fuck it — build a house."