Today, I have to visit dozens of other sites and services to make sense of my online life. This is a waste: I already have a record of all these transactions in my inbox. I just need a better way to look at them.

I agree with what's being said here, and I feel that we are close to a paradigm shift in the way we create and use an online 'information inbox.' Consider the myriad programs available to play or help organize this role:

• Email clients 
• Contact management 
• Social networking sites (think Facebook news feed) 
• Social networking aggregators (e.g. friendfeed.com) 
• Information managers (e.g. Evernote) 
• Bookmark managers 
• Todo/productivity applications 
• Many, many more

Some of the tools mentioned are, in essence, an information inbox, and indeed these tools often can be configured to duplicate records by sending them to an email inbox. Others are a like a information sentbox by aggregating all of your content and allowing you to share your sent box with others. Finally, the others generally function like information archives, a place to store information that you've encountered and may want to reference later.

The problem with these myriad applications is, of course, that they are myriad. More specifically, the applications were mostly designed independently and without consideration for (easy & structured) interaction with other applications. As a result, information does not easily flow from one application to the next, and even if it does it's often only in a 'dumb' way.

There is good news--the explosion of user generated content (yours and others) about which we care (to track and/or organize) is stimulating an equally vast number of attempts to organize this information and tools meant to help information flow 'smartly' between applications. This explosion is what's driving the paradigm shift I so eagerly await.