The ability to access your financial information in consolidated form from anywhere. This is what Mint.com does for its members. Mint.com looks at your financial picture, classifies expenditures, and analyzes spending. The site takes a read-only snap shot of your online bank accounts by using log-in information you provide. Mint.com only reads the accounts it does not maintain a connection with the banks, nor does it allow you to transfer money or make adjustments through the site.

I have been using Mint.com for the past couple months as our schools proxy servers block financial software like Microsoft Money or Intuit’s Quicken from connecting with the banks automatically. However Mint.com gets around this by being a application entirely based on the web. It has not been smooth sailing all the way for me with Mint.com. About 75% of my accounts worked, and after speaking with my banks and receiving little help from the Mint.com customer service department, it is still only 75% of my accounts that work. However, for the accounts that do work, I love it. The site is easy to use, beautifully designed, and a great idea.

The site makes money through offers it can make to you through it financial partners. All the offers aim to help you save money on fees and gain money on interest. They even explain that they don’t make money off of every deal they offer you. So why use this then the other computer based software? For the same reason you use Google Docs or any other “Web 2.0″ software, you have 24/7 global access to your resources, it just makes sense.

We have all heard of different companies using Second life for Marketing and even small time people doing business in Second Life. Some people are doing so much business they don’t have to have a real life job and devote their whole time to running their business in the game. Organizations and governments are also getting into the fray having Second Life Capital Hill and Reuters Island for constant Second Life news. Now there are also world wide conferences being held on Second Life and Law Associations are debating over the “law-less” Society.

According to an article on foxnews.com by Andrew Miga, Representative Edward Markey attended a conference on climate change from his office in DC over Second Life. Markey who could not leave DC for the conference attended as his virtual self and interacted with other participants in a virtual setting of the Bali conference. Markey was quoted as saying, “This is my first foray into Second Life, but it won’t be my last.”

At the same time that our leaders and we ourselves are able to attain and go places we never thought possible, there is still some caution needed. There are few rules in Second Life if any. Many small business owners in second life are concerned about intellectual property rights. Even the American Bar Association is getting into the fray contemplating not just Second life but also other online games (their site). The issue with Second Life is that their is no protection for business owners looking for recourse as explained in an article on Reuters Second Life news site. Business owners are taking a huge hit and I don’t see more people investing in the online economy to make money for the real world until the law-lessness is cleared up.

Real life and Second life are colliding. They are providing new ways for us to interact and new opportunities people never dreamed of. There are even new ways to interact with the computer and the game itself. Second Life is changing real life.

I don’t know anything about Kiva. Or, at least, I didn’t. I still don’t know that much, but from what I have learned, I believe Kiva.org is making a huge difference in the lives of people all over the world.

One of the largest questions I had when I first started researching was, “How does Kiva support itself?” If a company takes your money, lends 100% of it and then returns 100% to you, who is paying for their operations? According to their website they have some additional fees which are like a donation to help Kiva keep operating. They also have received some venture capital and angel funding. I would be interested to know what sort of return these VCs and Angels are hoping to achieve and what their motives are for donating the money beyond a tax write-off.

I was also noticing Kiva’s target market seems to be the individual user rather then the company or group. However, I was reading through a blog written by a gentleman by the name of Matt Wiseley on fastcompany.com. In his post entitled, From One Startup to Another, he speaks about how his company, editme.com, uses some of their deferred revenue for loans on Kiva. If you go to his company’s website there is a link to their Kiva profile on the homepage. In the blog he admits he does this for charitable reasons but also for positive marketing. People see his profile on Kiva and may become interested in thier company. It is not exactly active advertising, but it is good p.r. for his company and good for Kiva if they keep donating.

Editme.com is not the only company doing this either. Mansueto Ventures, parent company of Fast Company and Inc. magazines also donated to Kiva. In another blog on fastcompany.com the author, Kevin Ohannessian, writes about his thoughts on whether it is proper for companies to give like this. He poses two questions at the end of his short post which I think are pertinent for every business person to think about. “How does your company embrace social responsibility? What do you think are the best ways for companies to be socially responsible?”

I think we as college students need to contemplate these questions. Someday we will be the ones making the decisions. The better prepared, the more we have thought about, the more we are exposed, the better off we will be.

I have an ebay account, but I have never used it. I have never bought nor sold on ebay; so why do I have an account? I have this feeling that there will be something I need someday and I will only be able to find it on ebay. I have even gone as far as setting up my paypal account to charge my credit card accounts or checking accounts.

So why have I not used ebay? For me the site is not simple enough. I want to see a PS3 come up if I search for a PS3 and not hundreds of things related to a PS3 but no PS3. The whole process has baffled me. I want to use it; I think it would be fun to by and sell. Until the process for searching for goods becomes easier you won’t see me listing anything on Ebay.

I don’t understand why I find Ebay to be so complicated. I use their other product, Skype, all the time, video conferencing with my family where ever they are in the world. I love using skype and like Ebay, its free! (for the most part) The reason I love using skype, is that it is easy to use.

A simplification of their site, taking after the facebook example, might help them to bring in more buyers and sellers (clients from here forth) to boost their numbers. They recently changed their pricing structure (Foxnews.com article) to help bring in more clients and in doing so irked many of their sellers. Simplification may not be as easy as it sounds, I know there is so much information generated on that site, every minute even every second, that it might be impossible to completly organize.

I  also have an issue with not being able to know the seller, to see the product I am buying. Sure I can go down to the store try it out and then buy it from Ebay. Right now I’m just not comfortable with this sort of buying and selling for something important. I want to try Ebay, I want to use Ebay, but for now it will have to wait until I feel more comfortable with the technology and not being able to know the seller.

Facebook is not what it was when I was a freshmen here at GCC. I remember that day we were first able to log on (yes, sadly it is still in my head). It was sunny, during finals, and instead of studying or baking in the sun as I so frequently do, I was sitting inside, in front of my computer trying to beat my roommate in seeing who could get the most friends for the day. It was innocent, it was fun and most of all I felt it was secure.

Unlike Myspace.com (I have an account there too) I liked that Facebook restricted its user base to college students, and furthermore to individual schools being able to freely view your profile, while still allowing people to be friends with “real friends” at other colleges. Not that Myspace does not have security controls, it just seems that there it is black and white, no shades of gray as with Facebook.

But as we all do, Facebook had to grow up too. The aging process happened every time they added a new school or feature. After reading an article in a magazine called Fast Company, which I subscribe to, I realized that Facebook was just under a year old when we first logged on here at GCC (Here is a Fast Company graphic to illustrate my point). The social-networking site was still in her infancy, still an ad-hoc group of people and servers, people willing to try out new things and take the site in new ways people never thought possible.

Taking the site to new heights to me has three milestones – allowing the general public to use it, the news feed feature, and its application platform – which have determined the course the site has taken. Allowing the general public to use the site was great from a business perspective because Facebook was reaching out to all the people it previously alienated with its college only policy (I remember being one of them as a freshmen before we had Facebook). Through allowing more people to use the site, Facebook boosted (and still is boosting) its membership numbers and attracting more and more investment money.

Secondly, the news feed feature was a huge trial for Facebook and its privacy policies. The feature if you have ever used the site, allows us to see instant updates that our friends have made to their pages, messages they have left for other friends of ours, new posted pictures and items, etc. However, this was a huge adjustment to have all this information condensed and located in one central location. Previously, some of it was just spread out and available on the updated friends page. Due to the outcry from its users, Facebook updated its privacy controls to allow its users more control over the flow of their information.

This very reason, the control Facebook has always allowed its users over who has access to their personal information, is what concerns me about the Facebook application platform. I use applications, I think some of them are great, I think a lot of them are pointless; but in true, entrepreneurial spirit, each application is filling a void their creator thought needed to be filled. We even agree to use them, agree to share our information with the applications we install.

But, did you know, that you are also agreeing to share your information with applications your friends have installed? According to Chris Soghoian’s Blog on Cnet.com, that is exactly what we are doing through a very deeply buried privacy control. I had never seen these privacy controls before, but after reading his blog I visited my own account and there they were. I was (and I mean was) agreeing to share my information with people (and companies) I never knew would see my information.

Facebook has their reasons for burying the applications privacy controls, not that they are sinister in any way, shape or form. This type of behavior towards privacy controls is just not Facebook as it once was, where the old Facebook tried to make it as simple as possible to stop the spread of our information beyond people we directly allowed to see it.

I believe that any information we put on the web is our own responsibility. If you don’t want people to know about it or have it come up in a job interview someday, don’t put it on a social-networking site, no matter how secure you may think it is. I have since changed my privacy controls towards the applications platform, and I am contemplating scaling back the superfluous applications I use. The lesson I learned is that I need to be more vigilant in watching my privacy controls, and maybe taking a gander at them more then when big changes happen.

Facebook is not what it was, and for that matter neither are we. We all grow up, we all do stupid things, we all change and go through phases. I still love Facebook and continue being as addicted to it as I am to food and coffee (that’s another blog or ten). Facebook is growing out of its age of innocence, and just as we did, are doing and will do, its not all that bad.