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: 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)

: Image by kevindooley via Flickr

Instant access to your most valuable information from anywhere at any time is certainly a dream worth indulging. You can get much of the way to realizing that dream with various free and paid services. CIO.com has the lowdown on many of the options in this article by Ryan Faas of Computerworld.

The real challenge to the dream is the ability to make changes at one vantage point along your cloud-like chain and have that change reflected all across the stratosphere. This requires some sort of syncing capability controlled by a server in the cloud.

The four free services explored in the article include Google, Microsoft Windows Live, Yahoo Mail and Plaxo. The two paid services include Apple’s MobileMe and Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange. Hit the jump above for Faas’ take on each service’s strengths and weaknesses.

I primarily am using the paid service MobileMe, which syncs with my desktop’s Outlook 2007, which in turn syncs with Google Calendar. My Google Calendar is accessible by both my husband and I so that we can keep tabs of both business and personal commitments. I am driving the syncing process from my iPhone, as that is my preferred method of calendar entry. I am not fully exploiting the cloud capabilities of MobileMe, mostly using the services for the wireless syncing ability. This system is working well for me at this time.

When considering which approach to use, examine your own habits and determine how you input your information and how you prefer to access that information. One of the options examined by Faas should fit the bill.

Would love to hear what other people are doing about keeping their information up to date at all points along the cloud chain.