JeremyMorel.com

I don’t know about you, but as technology becomes more and more integrated into the everyday, I find that more and more people expect me to be online.  If that wasn’t such a fluid term, things would be a lot easier.  These days, online communication branches all over a social networking plane.  Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, Twitter… and that’s only the ones I checked in the last 10 minutes.  I always snicker at the recent commercial for Hulu that had Denis Leary mocking social networking sites by referring to them as Facespaces and Tweetypages, but that’s the reality… it all collides into one big social networking smorgasbord.

Well if you’re like me, and trying to keep up, there’s hope.  There are services out there like NutShellMail and Fuser.

Both are equally as cool, and have pros and cons to them.

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First I’ll cover NutShellMail.  It might seem counter-intuitive to sign up for yet another web service to try and cut back on another, but you have no idea what kind of power NutshellMail can give you. It solves what I’ll call the Email Alert Circle, which goes something like this:

• You have a few free minutes, so you quickly login to all your social networking sites, and try to speed-read all the updates.  It’s just too much, and you inevitably miss something.  (I always get called out on this! Ugh!)   You stop visiting so often, knowing that you’re soon to become the butt of neophyte jokes everywhere. You switch to e-mail alerts.
• Now you get direct messages, replies and relevant friend posts… but you find it easy to duck your e-mail and you wind up catching up on these two weeks later.  Now your avoiding your e-mail!

The proposed solution: get a free account at NutshellMail. Authorize it to parse your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and/or LinkedIn accounts, and it takes all those “John Doe commented on your status” and “Jane Doe sent you a direct message” emails you really don’t need to see right this minute and delivers them in a digest format whenever and however you want them.

I can already hear some of you arguing, “But Twitter is an of-the-moment service!”  Fine—go ahead and schedule your NutshellMail updates to arrive every so many hours, depending on your addiction. You’ll still get all the updates for everyone you’re following, and you won’t even have to hop into Twitter.com/TweetDeck/Tweetie/whatnot to reply, because NutshellMail lets you @ reply via email links.

For those who can be realistic about how connected they need to be, NutshellMail takes the constant back-to-work hurdles of email updates, known as bacn in some circles, and pounds them into one flat page.

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Next up, Fuser.  Think of Fuser as “one inbox to rule them all.”  Fuser fetches your email and social networking messages and displays them in a single place to simplify their management. Register at Fuser and then add your Facebook and/or MySpace login details, as well as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AIM or any POP3/IMAP email accounts and see all your messages in Fuser. Fuser isn’t an email client or backup service, mind you—if you delete a message from your Gmail account it will not appear on Fuser. It’s just a single place to see all your stuff.  What’s cool is that you can create folders inside fuser, move messages into them, and should you need to sign into your Yahoo or Gmail account directly some day down the road — Tada!  The folder is there, with all the shared content in tact!  Neat!  In addition to message management, Fuser is a pretty cool content manager.  When you add your accounts, Fuser automatically sucks in all your address book and contacts.  (Even makes contacts from your Twitter followers!)  Of course, this may mean you have duplicate contacts now.  Don’t sweat it!  Just drag and drop to combine contacts.

As an aside, I think it’s fair to remind you that each of these services require you to share your login details with a 3rd party.  I encourage you to do your own homework to determine whether or not you feel good about sharing your information with a private company.  I think these two services are relatively safe, but their privacy practices are always subject to change — so keep it in the back of your mind!

The two services talked about here are known as Social Networking ‘aggregators’.  They aren’t the only ones out there to be had, just two of the neatest ones I’ve yet to encounter.  If you’ve discovered one that you can’t live without, sound off about it in the comments section.  I’m always up for trying something new!