by Jamie Elizabeth

Created on: February 21, 2010   Last Updated: February 23, 2010

As is true for many people, I use the internet for work, play, and keeping in touch. Email, twitter, and social networking sites such as Facebook make it very easy to keep in touch with many people and to do so for free. Helium, freelancer.com, and many other websites make it very easy not only to find work, but to earn money online as well. Then, of course, there are the websites such as stumbleupon.com, youtube.com, and the many free gaming websites that make it easy to waste plenty of time online.

Email is an easy way to keep in touch at work, and is also a great way to keep in touch with family and friends. Free email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, and YahooMail are easy to use and are easily available to all internet users. Facebook makes it very easy to search for people you haven’t seen in years and to send them messages, write on their walls, and even instant message. Facebook is also a great platform for sharing photos and even ideas, on their new twitter-like status feature.

Helium is a great website that I use often to publish articles, find information, and find freelance writing opportunities. Freelancer.com is a great resource for writers - it is often possible to spend more time browsing the writing opportunities than it is actually writing, however. This is often true of Helium as well. Odesk, elance, and Constant Content are other websites that I find myself browsing as I work on the internet.

The options for fun on the internet are seemingly endless, and I am no stranger to the websites that alleviate boredom or allow you to procrastinate for hours. Stumbleupon.com lets you choose certain topics of interest, such as humor, and it will randomly generate sites based on those topics for you to browse. It is very easy to waste hours clicking through these sites, saving them as favorites, and then returning to them later on. Youtube is also one of the best sites for fun online, as it is extremely popular and has a huge database of entertaining videos. Youtube also allows users to save favorites and recommends videos based on user favorites, again making it very easy to spend hours having fun on the website.

There are many ways to use the internet, some productive and some not, but it is a great tool for communication, making money, and just generally having fun. Explore it a bit to find out what is out there, but be sure to keep track of the time you are spending browsing the web.

Learn more about this author, Jamie Elizabeth.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.