• The New York Times, Thursday, August 11, 2011 10:10 AM

How are consumers coping with social media overload? The New York Times counts the ways. As the paper reports, one young New Yorker tries to limit her social activity to Twitter and e-mail, though she has been experimenting with Google+ since its recent debut. Meanwhile, "the most active and organized users of social networks have daily routines for grooming their digital identities," NYT explains. "Generally, these routines rely on automation and syndication."

For that, consumers are resorting to sites like Ping.fm, OnlyWire and Hellotxt, which let them post the same content across multiple networking sites with a click or two of a mouse. Other sites, like Buffer, SocialOomph and TwitResponse, allow users to write postings months in advance, and schedule them for publication at a later date.

Along with automation, Josh Kaufman, the author of "The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business," keeps his social networking dashboards open on his computer all day. When he has to focus, however, he defers to Freedom, a productivity application that blocks the Internet for up to eight hours.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »