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Bobby Travis

This is a post by Bobby Travis, who wrote with me at 40Tech from 2009 through 2012. Bobby has since moved on to bigger and better things, but I've left all of his great contributions up on the site. - Evan

Latest posts by Bobby Travis (see all)

• Easy Access to US, UK Streaming Services From Anywhere - August 18, 2012
• 5 Fresh Android Games Released in 2012 - July 5, 2012
• Google Chrome Explodes On To iOS, Puts Desktop Experience In Your Pocket - June 30, 2012

Remember, back in the day, when email was one-dimensional? The good ol’ days when all you had to do was remember one contact list and deal with one inbox? Well, those days are long gone, buddy. Today, we are in a world of social media: connecting and sharing with the planet at large in as many ways and as quickly as possible. Workplaces everywhere are banning social media because people are addicted to it and they just ain’t gettin’ nuthin done. Nuthin’. Yep. We are also in a world of the high speed degradation of da englich langage, loosing it fastr den wat wuz expected — but that’s another post (ohh that pained me!). Threadsy can’t help you with that last bit or the work bans — you’ll need to look to yourself, your conscience, and your pocket computery phone for that — but Threadsy can help you out with the constant jumping from webpage to webpage or tool to tool to deal with your three main inboxes: Email, Facebook and Twitter.

Inbox Features

Threadsy delivers all of your direct interactions with your contacts (Facebook messages and comments conversations, Twitter @messages and direct messages, as well as emails) directly to an email-like inbox that can either show all of your accounts in one time separated stream, or, if you have busy accounts, they can be filtered by service to keep you from drowning or exploding from inbox overload. Multiple accounts are supported for all platforms except Facebook and updates arrive in real-ish time (my personal tests showed updates being realized within about a minute of posting), which is cool. There is support for IMAP as well, for you IMAP email lovers, but there is no need to get fancy with a Gmail account as many of the features, such as Mark as Read or Unread, Archiving and Deleting are automatically reflected in both services. Labels/Folders have recently been added as well. Let me know in the comments what your experiences are with other email platforms.

With Facebook and Twitter, you can do pretty much anything you could want to do with those services, such as liking (thumbs up), commenting, viewing other comments, retweeting (the original way, not the integrated Twitter way) and replying to @ and direct messages. You can also do all of these things and more in the handy dandy collapsible sidebar.

Sidebar Features

Aside from the features mentioned above, the Threadsy sidebar also allows inline viewing of images and video, as well as short-link expansion (in inbox as well) and all of the other things we have come to expect from a robust Twitter/Facebook client. You can view all of your streams or your account filtered streams in real time, interact with each item separately, and can update your status for one or all of your accounts across both platforms. There is also a nice Profile section that shows you the amalgamated streams of the particular contact/friend/Tweep you are interacting with – it even shows you recent pictures posted and tries to link you to the various different social media services they belong to (even ones outside of Facebook and Twitter) and have allowed the world at large to know about. The sidebar has two width levels and can be collapsed completely for an inbox-only view.

Say hello to our founder everyone:

Seamlessness

Threadsy is fairly seamless in how it handles cross-platform interactions. As mentioned above, when you delete, archive, or mark and email as read/unread in Threadsy or in the original account, the action is reflected on each service. Contrarily, when you delete an item from Facebook or Twitter to clean up your inbox, this is not reflected on Facebook or Twitter — which is a good thing, generally, as it keep your stream intact and saves you from deleting something by mistake from an account that has not archive or trash folder to save it from…

Most Twitter features seem to be in Threadsy, such as retweets (mentioned earlier), Twitter search, saved searches, favourites, etc. There is also a handy inbox search that will search through everything in your inbox, which is extremely cool. No search modifiers like Gmail though — just straight ahead search everything by keyword.

The seamless approach dims a bit when trying to send a message on Facebook, however. When you choose to send a Facebook message you need to allow a pop-up that contains Facebook and automatically directs you to the Messages inbox, complete with the Facebook compose window. The good thing here, though, is that content that you have already written in Threadsy will already be in the compose window, waiting for you. You can even forward a Twitter message or Email or pretty much anything in your inbox directly to a Facebook message — which is very cool! No attachments though. That you will have to take care of via the Facebook window.

Some Issues

Threadsy is still in beta, and while they are quick to add new features (email labels/folders) just showed up today, and to fix errors in general, the shiny seal is still on the package. Some issues I have run into are as follows:

• Replying to a Facebook message leads you to a pop-up Facebook window that gives you an error — and, oddly, appears to be either a custom Facebook app or a potentially new version of Facebook as things are, shall we say… rejigged. You can still reply to a message, however, if you attempt to compose one and then cancel the text window and, instead, open the message you wish to reply to.
• I have also noticed some hang-on-open issues when attempting to open a message in the inbox, as well as times when no updates will come, even when manually refreshing the inbox. This is always fixed by a refresh of the entire page, and may not be a problem with Threadsy, but a problem with the browser I am using (Google Chrome — developer version). Let me know in the comments what your experiences are here.
• I found, once or twice, that new email messages would appear in my inbox when I was in the Twitter account filter. Maybe this is a feature?

Features I’d Like to See

There are a few features missing in Threadsy, I think, and hope they will be added soon. Here’s my list, what’s yours?

• CC/BCC features for email
• A Drafts area for messages
• A way to easily navigate to the next or previous message from within an open message
• Setup to bypass workplace lockouts like Brizzly does (not my request, but a friend’s of course :P )
• Advanced email features/plugins for signatures, multiple send-from accounts, calendar integration, etc.
• An easy way to send a Direct Message on Twitter — so far you can only reply to them, as far as I can tell
• This is my favourite one:
  • I would like Threadsy to actually thread my email conversations. This does not happen — which I find altogether annoying, ironic and somewhat funny, considering the name.

Other Cool Features

Threadsy also incorporates the Meebo bar, which allows you to connect to multiple chat clients, including Facebook chat. this little addition is the final bit that makes Threadsy a truly unsiversal tool for the most popular ways to communicate on the web.

I highly recommend you give Threadsy a try, They are doling out invitations to users ion groups of 10, which then need to be sent out to the web at large via Facebook and Twitter. Hop in the comments and tell me you want and I’ll hook you up with a link. You’ll have to act fast on it though, as anyone in my network will also have a chance to grab it! When their gone, let me know and I’ll post another one when I get the next link cycle.