With every new piece of research that emerges it becomes apparent that social media is here to stay, and growing to dominate the Internet at large.

According to a recent study, 1 in every 6 minutes spent online is spent on social media. This equates to 16% of the total time spent online – and social media has now surpassed all but searching as the number one online activity.

The usage of social media has doubled since 2007, and with 60% of adults now using multiple social sites, the need for reducing the time that you waste has increased greatly.

The more sites you use, the more your content becomes spread far and wide and thus it becomes necessary to require some kind of control. If you were using 25 different sites, some social media, an email account or two and an instant messaging service, how much time would it take to use these sites on a daily basis? Come to that, how much time would it take to even log in to that many different sites?

Based on an average login time of 15 to 20 seconds per site on a daily basis, the average user spends a total of 14 minutes a week logging into various accounts (email, social, IM) – extrapolated out over the course of a year that’s a total of 12.1 hours wasted just logging in to your social feeds and personal accounts.

With the meteoric rise of social media looking to continue over the coming years, many people are now turning to social media aggregators to improve their efficiency online.

With this in mind, and in light of their ongoing work to make the Internet a safer and easier place to operate, AVG has now partnered with MultiMi, an aggregating tool that combines all social feeds, instant messenger, cloud storage, blog feeds and multiple email feeds into one easily-accessible personal dashboard that will save you half a day a year in wasted time.

Not only does MultiMi save you time and effort across the board, it also acts as a powerful search tool, allowing you to explore your entire digital life with ease. The software is downloaded to and runs from your PC desktop making it swift and easy to use.

Also, with the news that Facebook users are happy to add strangers as friends, safety has never been more important as we can no longer guarantee that links shared by others are trustworthy. For this reason Multimi includes AVG’s powerful LinkScanner technology to ensure that any phishing or link scams are stopped in their tracks.

Save me half a day a year AND ensure that all the links I click and share and that my personal details are kept safe? It’s a no-brainer.

 MultiMi™ is a new desktop application designed to integrate and manage a user’s digital interactions. Encompassing social media and cloud-based services as well as traditional email-based communications, MultiMi is a new connection hub for our digital lives.

So how does it work? Bringing together several communications channels into one intelligently integrated dashboard is a complex process. But the mechanics behind this process are performed by a light autonomous piece of software that knows how to EXTRACT and POST information to the services the user wants.

MultiMi works by a process of defined steps, which can be summarized as follows:

1. MultiMi asks what kind of connection protocol is being used e.g. IMAP etc.
2. MultiMi establishes the input/output parameters required to communicate
3. MultiMi asks what kind of authentication measures need to be met
4. MultiMi asks what kind of legitimate information can be exchanged
5. MultiMi asks what length, size and shape of data can be exchanged
6. MultiMi examines who is sharing this information
7. MultiMi then integrates and aggregates the information found into a common view

Users can, for example, drag a tweet into an email, or drop email photo attachments directly into Flickr or Picasa. MultiMi integrates multiple channels seamlessly.

The power of MultiMi stems from the simplicity of the framework behind the application itself. Its ability to integrate data in the most scalable manner sets it apart from social network aggregators; all the information is brought together, digested and presented in a way that allows the user to move data around in a more manageable manner than if it were standing alone.

Taking control of content – empowering users MultiMi’s connection with AVG makes a lot of sense. As users open their doors to what is effectively a massive throng of guests all at once (i.e. potentially unchecked pieces of information flowing from numerous social media and communication channels) AVG LinkScanner^® security technology is in place to give users the peace of mind that any links they click will have been scanned for safety beforehand.

Each individual service or ‘element’ (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc.) needs to be temporally ‘interrogated’ so that MultiMi can ask what the legitimate time frames to communicate with that service are. Conversely, MultiMi also allows the user to specify the frequency at which they receive communication from each element.

Eidan Apelbaum, CEO of Zbang It, says that users generally demand simplicity (99% of the population does, at least). However, more technically savvy users often want to have more interaction; although most applications come with default settings that many users accept, some users still want to customize their experiences with these apps. MultiMi gives the latter group the opportunity to tweak settings to suit their needs.

“We can modify the MultiMi application during its live runtime at the back end so if Facebook (or another element) suddenly starts to offer a modified service at some level, we can adapt to build this new update’s requirements into MultiMi’s live service in real time,” says Apelbaum.

MultiMi’s power is derived from its simplicity, as well as its ability to handle complex interaction technologies and manage them intuitively to present a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.