inbox | Advocate's Studio

: Image via CrunchBase

Email. Twitter. Facebook. Chat. These are just four of the major message sources on the Web these days. If you have a few friends and professional contacts, the messages really start to pile up. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to aggregate all of your messages and most of your social contact in one place?

You can functionally achieve message aggregation using Gmail as your master inbox, but this solution cannot touch the flash and ease of Threadsy (link here). Threadsy is another social web application, but its focus is on managing your messages across services. Threadsy combines Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, MobileMe, Yahoo Mail, and other IMAP accounts, and popular chat formats. Being able to view them all in one locale is cool enough, but Threadsy takes it one step futher by allowing you to reply, archive, delete and manipulate your messages and set status posts like you would in each application.

As you can see above, the window is split, with messages showing in the left-hand window, and status updates (tweets, etc.) in the right-hand window. Threadsy also incorporates social information into your meta-inbox – simply click on a user’s profile and see their bio, photos and other publicly available information. Gives it a bit of a Xobni or Rapportive touch to your inbox.

Everything is click-able and expandable. Of course, it pulled my art blog handle, rather than my legal tech blog handle for the bio – not sure how to fix that yet.

Several months ago, I got an invite to Threadsy’s private beta and I really liked what I saw. I ultimately gave up on using it on a daily basis because it seemed to bog down my browser when I left it open. Threadsy has just become public and is sporting an even slicker image. So far, it seems to be performing more smoothly than before. I am committed to giving it another try – any tool that’s free and boosts my efficiency will find itself at the top of my tool belt!

Check out Threadsy – would love to know what you think about it.

Threadsy’s Social Stream Reader Opens To The Public (techcrunch.com)
Social Communications Platform Threadsy Is Now Open To The Public (thenextweb.com)
Threadsy launches a sort of Outlook for social networks (venturebeat.com)

I admit it. I really am beginning to seriously dislike email inboxes. I have been avoiding my desktop Outlook inbox like the plague. I am better about monitoring my Gmail accounts, but even that can get tedious.

Information overload? I already employ filters on my computer and phone to strain the best news, social status updates, tweets and blog posts. Why can’t I have a similar filtering system for my overburdoned inbox?

Well, I know I already can from within the inbox itself. But that requires you to actually go to your inbox and open your folders.

Check this out. The current version of application AwayFind (ver. 2.0) (link here), allows you to install filters on your email (no biggie) and to designate “urgent” email that will follow you by phone call, instant message, text message or even tweet (way cool)! Never visit your inbox again!

Apparently, filtering set up is strikingly similar to the tools you probably already are using in your own inbox. Filter by person, by keyword (e.g. “urgent”), subject, receiving email address, etc. Then, here is the genius part, tell AwayFind how to alert you when an email falls into one of your filter categories: all the major IM clients, Twitter, text message or even a phone call. You can also set up an auto-response and exclude specific persons from the auto-response. You can probably figure out where to take this last feature.

If you are a Firefox user, there is a plug-in that lets you manage AwayFind from within your inbox. Apparently a Chrome plug-in is coming soon. Google and IMAP are supported, as are hosted Exchange-based 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Unfortunately for us regular folk, this application is currently in private beta, invite only. Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb – head over there now and see if you can score one of their invitations! (link here)