These days, at least if you do most of your business via the web, like I do, people expect you to be constantly connected, both to email and to the various social networking sites. Managing all of your accounts can quickly turn into a massive time suck.
Threadsy joins a list of new tools, such as LifeIO, that want to make your Internet life easier by simplifying your communications. The service, which debuted recently at the TechCrunch50, was described by TechCrunch as a “communication stream rule them all.” It brings together email, Twitter and Facebook.
This “One Ring” of email and social networking is still in private beta. I immediately went on a quest for an invite, and finally got one last night. (I’m sure I’ve said this before, but private beta invitations rock my world.)
Threadsy takes your email accounts, Twitter accounts and Facebook account and puts them all together in a centralized location. It also classifies your messages as either “Inbound” (addressed only to you, like an email message, a Twitter DM, or a Facebook message) or Unbound (tweets and status updates addressed to the whole world.)
All of your inbound messages go on the left, while your unbound messages go to the right. By default, you see messages from all of your accounts in a single thread, but you can also filter the columns so that they only show messages from a particular account.
Composing a message in Threadsy is easy-unlike LifeIO, it pulls your contact information so you don’t have to remember email addresses. All you have to do is type in the first letter of the person’s name, and you’ll get a list of matching contacts from your email accounts and from Facebook.
There a couple of potential drawbacks to using Threadsy, however. First, if you use Gmail and like to organize your messages with labels, you won’t be able to do that with Threadsy. Second, there’s no way to sift through your Twitter account and view only @replies or only DMs. It’s just all in one long thread. With so many people using auto-DM’s to promote their Mafia games, this can be annoying.
Also, there’s no keyword search and no way to organize your tweeps into groups, so power Twitter users will probably want to use a Twitter client with more functionality. I’ll probably keep coming back to Threadsy for email and Facebook, but continue using Mixero and Hootsuite for Twitter.
Other than that, though, Threadsy is really cool. The user interface is attractive and intuitive-no small feat considering the amount of information Threadsy organizes for you. Although the basic concept is not new, Threadsy’s approach to organizing communications makes it innovative and useful.
What do you think of Threadsy?
Our Rating of Threadsy
Categories:social