According to a recent survey ordered by MyLife.com and conducted by Harris Interactive, 66% of the American adults are afraid of missing out on important events if they don't check their social media updates.

An interesting finding shows that 40% of the respondents would rather do traditionally unpleasant activities rather than closing down their social media profiles. Among those things we find running a marathon, reading "War and Peace", giving up an hour of sleep each night for a whole year, going to the dentist for a root canal, cleaning the showers at their local gym or even spending a whole night in jail. However, according to a report from Ipsos in April 2012, Americans would not give up TV for social networking (74%). This result is above the global average, which is at 58%.

Even though Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide, the same can't be said about the United States. When talking about content sharing, Foursquare topped with 44% and Facebook scored only 17%. The number one network for only consuming information (and not participating in the discussions) is LinkedIn (48%), followed by YouTube (57%) and Twitter (53%). Pinterest also topped Facebook as the social network on which people are most likely to share and consume content equally (46% vs. 44%), with Tumblr closing in at 41%.

The majority of the users (57%) wish that there could be a way to protect and manage all their social media profiles and emails in a single place. It is for those users that MyLife has released a new service called the MyLife Social App and Dashboard.

The new dashboard helps people manage their virtual lives in a single, central place. At the moment, MyLife's users can link their Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL accounts as well as their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Support for Pinterest and Tumblr will most likely be added later on this year.

Note about the information: The data was analyzed from an online survey conducted within the United States among 2037 adults ages 18 and older. The whole research was ordered by MyLife and conducted by Harris Interactive. It took place in July 2012.