Recently I’ve begun using a couple of sites to help me with my internet addiction. These aren’t going to keep me off of the net completely, but make my browsing more efficient.

First up is mint.com, which allows you to monitor all of your various bank accounts and credit cards all in one place. “Mint connects nightly to the…[accounts]…you choose to keep your transactions and account balances automatically up-to-date. Mint even auto-balances your checkbook and auto-categorizes your transactions. Set it up once and you’re done.” The expense categorization isn’t perfect, but you can create rules to help the process in the future. The cool part is that once it’s right, you can view your expenses broken into various categories over a user defined time period, and see where all of your money is going. I haven’t figured out how mint.com will balance my checkbook yet, but I’m just staring to use the site.

The second site is spokeo.com and I just started using it today. This site allows you to monitor all of those social networking sites (myspace, facebook, etc) along with various photo sharing sites and blogs all in one place. I doubt I’ll use it to keep track on blogs, since I already use bloglines for that, but I do like the auto monitoring of the social network sites that work blocks. This allows you to keep up even if you can’t connect to the sites directly yourself. Plus, it will also find your friends on various sites that you didn’t even know they had accounts on. All you do is enter your email address and password and it does the dirty work for you. So far I’m really impressed by the site, but we’ll see how long it stays in my rotation.