Threadsy has recently updated and added some new features that expands its already ambitious goal of becoming your universal social inbox. In addition to aggregating all of your regular webmail accounts (Gmail (s goog), Yahoo (s yhoo) and Hotmail (s msft)), it has now added support for Apple (s aapl) MobileMe (me.com/mac.com email addresses). Throw in your Facebook inbox and wall messages along with your direct messages and replies from Twitter and you’ve created quite a versatile communication center.
Besides the new features, Threadsy has resolved many bugs and vastly improved its load time. Considering everything that it’s trying to do at once, it’s understandable why its launch sequence seemed sluggish, especially compared with regular one-mailbox email services. In my testing, I set up several different types of email and social-networking accounts. In a matter of seconds, I was looking at Twitter and Facebook messages and emails from my Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail accounts, and could quickly jump from the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink view of all my messages to each service’s view.
I like how Threadsy pays attention to the little details with its UI. For example, if you don’t look closely then you’ll miss another useful new feature which can be a big time-saver. When you open an email message, the action icons are now always conveniently visible at the top.
Many users still don’t know about Threadsy’s support for Meebo’s Meebo Bar, which was announced in November. This opens up your Threadsy to IM, because you can now add all of your accounts from GTalk, AIM, Yahoo Chat, MSN Chat, Facebook Chat, MySpace IM and many more.
MySpace M.I.A?
Speaking of MySpace, I do have one minor complaint. I don’t understand why Threadsy doesn’t support MySpace. True, its popularity has dropped in recent times, replaced by Facebook and Twitter, but believe it or not there are still tons of folks using MySpace. As a matter of fact, I have many friends that only use MySpace so there’s no way to communicate with them from inside Threadsy, which defeats its purpose of being a unified social inbox. Threadsy reps told me that they have just received the development documentation for the new MySpace API that was released last week. Although no time frame was given, this clearly means there are plans to support MySpace in the near future, which is great news.
Threadsy is still in private beta, but if you’d like to give it a test drive yourself there are invites available to the first 500 people to click this link.
Tried Threadsy? Let us know what you think. Is it still information overload or is this the future of online communication?
