Too many online accounts? You need an aggregator.
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Multitasking - Image Courtesy of Stock Xchng From Twitter to Digg, emails to IM and let's not forget all those social networking sites, its easy to get bogged down just by logging on.
Fortunately, you can keep your online socialite status without sacrificing productivity in the process. If you've got too many online accounts, there's just one thing to do: aggregate them, baby!
The first thing we want to do is pull all of our various lines of communication together in one simple place. Fortunately, Fuser allows you to do just that. You can link a whole range of email addresses, including Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL and even POP3 accounts to Fuser so that when you log in, you see all of your emails in one inbox. Fuser indicates which email came from what account and you can respond or file them away in custom folders you create.
Fuser will also aggregate your MySpace and Facebook accounts so that you can receive your messages and comments from the Fuser interface. And as if that weren't enough, you can also link your Twitter account to keep up with what fellow Twitterers are doing and send new tweets as you like.
It used to be that ICQ and MSN IM were the top ways to chat real-time online. Now there's a whole host of IM providers and if you're like me, you probably have an ID with every single one.
To avoid having upteen different IM windows open on your desktop, you need something that will allow you to manage them all at once.
Enter Pidgin, a downloadable application that works with sixteen - count em, sixteen - IM applications, including AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, Yahoo! and Zephyr to name a few.
Just download the application, create your account - yes, its free! - and start linking your various IM apps to Pidgin to manage.
For those of you who want to promote your online profile, there's ProfileFly. This web-based service allows you to link to a variety of online profiles, including MySpace, Hi5 and Facebook, along with Twitter, Last.FM, Flickr, your multitude of social bookmarking sites and of course, your blogs, your IM accounts and even various email addresses.
You can add as many or as few as you like and when you're finished, you've got something that resembles a MySpace profile only it ties in all your various social efforts around the web.
The profile is searchable and if you include your email or IM accounts, the public can see them and can use them to contact you.
Definitely not for the shy or anonymous-oriented but if you really want to be the social butterfly, then hey... ProfileFly can certainly help.
Profilatic is another social networking aggregator/promoter but with a lot more flexibility and it works with a whopping 186 social sites plus you can add as many custom sites as you want. It also works with WordPress so you can add a "lifestream" (which is another way of saying profile) to your blog. Profilatic features feeds from your various sources - blogs, twitter, MySpace, etc - and it provides link so that friends and stalkers know where to find you on the web. You can see mine here .
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I love Pidgin. Using it right now, as a matter of fact!
MSN was the top way to IM? bwahahahaha! I'll give you ICQ, but not MSN.
I use GAIM all the time. I believe it's based on Pidgin.
so maybe MSN wasn't the "top" way but it was one of the first... i was debating between MSN, Yahoo! and AIM... MSN won for no particular reason but still... you got my point, right :)
Haven't used GAIM... I'll have to check it out.
Meebo is what I use when I'm away from my computer and want to get to my Yahoo and AIM instant messaging services.
Digsby is king of aggregators IMO. I switched from Pidgin to Digsby and never looked back. It handles IM, Emails, and Social Networking sites all from the buddy list very well and presents in a much more appealing way than Pidgin.
I second Ryan's Digsby recommendation. It's a great interface that handles all the things he mentions, and Twitter, too. I love it!
I'm more interested in pulling together the sites I frequent than letting people know everything about me online. So far iGoogle has been working pretty well to compile everything in one place.
Pulls together Twitter, Google Reader, LinkedIn, etc.
Great for all the social networking sites.
i use it to give me a once-over for virtually ALL my stuff; my credit cards balance, the minutes used on my phone plan, etc.
http://www.MyReader.net enables a person to keep information organized by 'Topic'. The information can be anything from email, newsgroups, blogs, RSS, etc. to monitoring chnages to information and events sucha as changes in search engine ranking, weather, stock prices, etc.
gaim = what pidgin used to be called before aol sued them for having "aim" in the name.
With all the different aggregators for different types of accounts - email, social networking, IM - what does the ideal aggregator include without becoming overwhelming? At Fuser, we've tried to focus on offering users a way to manage their data in a way that is useful to them - and for us that started with Email, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. What do you all think, what should an aggregator include, and when does it become just another account to manage?
Thanks so much for the suggestions, I'm going to try Fuzer.
-Suz
and does not see my emails :-(
I second the other recommendations for Digsby. It, unlike Pidgin, also works with Facebook chat, which is the main reason I switched to it from Pidgin.
Thanks for the Digsby recommendation. I've used Pidgin in the past but there were always a couple things lacking. Hopefully Digsby works out.
If you are a student, or have a home-based business Fuser and Pidgin are ok. But if you work in an office and prefer a more professional looking aggregator, you should try LiveGo.com . I have been using it just for a few minutes, but it looks good enough. It lets you add email, Twitter and Facebook. I have not found any other email aggregator as user-friendly and professional as Threadsy, which would have been my first suggestion, but there have been notifications in their blog that the service is shutting down as of Nov. 2nd 2011.