I love private beta invites, so when I woke up this morning with an invite for LifeIO in my inbox, I knew I had to cover it immediately.  LifeIO is a service that is supposed to integrate all your RSS feeds, social networking profiles, email accounts, and more into one easy-to-manage service.

The overall concept is similar to Streamy, but way more ambitious. Streamy integrates RSS and social networking, while LifeIO also includes email, chat, a calendar, a to-do list feature, and a place to save notes. There’s also a search feature that lets you search all of the above.

At first, I thought I had found my new start page. LifeIO beautifully designed. Plus, it’s customizable-you can customize the background by changing the theme and uploading a background image, if you so desire.

The right-hand side of the page is devoted to your “Stream,” a constant feed of new stories. Your stream comes pre-loaded with some feeds, but you can remove and add feeds as you like. You can also control how fast the stories change.

At the top of the page, a row of icons lets you navigate between email, social networks, your calendar, shopping sites, to-dos, your RSS reader, etc.  There’s also a “Now” button that takes you to a homescreen with the most recent posts from each of these categories. Stories from your RSS reader are marked with the RSS icon, email messages are marked with an envelope, and to-dos and notes are marked with the appropriate icons.

LifeIO has a lot of potential, but it needs some additional work before it will replace Feedly as my home page. First of all, the only social networking site that integrates with LifeIO is Twitter, although TechCrunch, which covered the service in July, assures us that more are on the way.

Second, the way it handles Twitter accounts could be improved.  When you view Tweets on the “Now” page as thumbnails, the only thing you see is the text of the tweet, with no indication of who sent it. To see that information, you have to switch to the list view. Also, Twitter being what it is, some support for Twitter groups would be nice-there’s really only certain people whose tweets I want included in my stream.

I love that LifeIO lets you add multiple email accounts-but not being able to import your Gmail contacts is a big problem. That means that if I want to compose an email from LifeIO (as opposed to hitting the reply button), I actually have to remember the recipient’s email address. Or, I could go to my Gmail account and respond from there…but that kind of defeats the purpose of having the account up on my LifeIO page, doesn’t it?

Likewise, it would be nice if you could connect LifeIO to your Google Calender instead of having to download it and then import the file. Also, the to-do list is adequate for casual users-but it would be nice to be able to connect LifeIO with more robust task management apps like Remember the Milk or Toodledo.

Finally,  the ability to better organize RSS feeds would be excellent. I want to be able to divide my feeds into folders or categories, so if I’m in the mood to browse new recipes I don’t have to scroll through the latest TechCrunch stories to get to them.

LifeIO aims to do so much, pulling together the functionality of a bunch of different tools and apps.  In order to  succeed, though, I think it needs to perform all of these functions really well, not just adequately. Otherwise, enough great apps have iGoogle widgets that I can do as well or better with a customized iGoogle page-the only thing that would be missing would be support for multiple email/chat accounts.

Of course, LifeIO is still in private beta.  You can sign up for a launch email here. Hopefully, soon they’ll at least add more social networks and the ability to import Google contacts. If they did that and allowed me to organize my RSS feeds, they could easily become my new start page!

Our Rating of LifeIO

Tags: Email, News, Twitter

Categories:web