The Unique People Focus

While handling all your email and social networking communication from one place is a no-brainer, there is a tremendous benefit of using Threadsy that is not readily apparent before you use it. Imagine you’re responding to a friend or colleague’s email discussing a specific topic. With your regular webmail, you will simply respond to the topic being discussed in the email, right?

Now, in Threadsy, while you are replying to her via email, you see her Facebook status or recent tweet – “Just got tickets for the U2 concert!” – and you just might add something to your email. Threadsy makes this possible via the automatic Profile View, which you shall see below. In this way, Threadsy lets you focus on people, not the medium of communication you or they might prefer. You don’t miss a person’s recent status updates just because you don’t use Facebook or Twitter often enough.

The Integrated View

Threadsy keeps it simple by showing all your email and social networking communication in two columns or streams. The Inbound column has messages specifically addressed to you. This includes Email, Twitter @replies and Direct Messages, and your Facebook Inbox. The Unbound column shows feeds that you follow, such as your Twitter stream and Facebook friends’ status updates. You can adjust the width of the Unbound column using the arrow sliders in between the two panes.

Note that Threadsy is not a Personal Information Manager. If you want calendar, notes, RSS feeds, etc. all in one place, check out Life.io. Threadsy focuses on communication and excels by keeping it simple. At present, you need to add a webmail account to use Threadsy, so for example, you can’t use it with just your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Adding Accounts

Adding your email and social networking accounts is as easy as pie, but you do need to provide your login credentials to Threadsy. Twitter OAuth is coming soon and you can use Facebook connect after you have logged in. For webmail accounts, Threadsy supports AOL, Gmail (and Google Apps), Hotmail and Yahoo! US.

Inbound: What’s Sent To You

The Inbound column shows all your messages in a chronological sequence, whether they are email, Twitter replies, or Facebook messages. Icons at the right of each message help you quickly identify the type of message. You can quickly filter messages by type using the tabs at the top for your webmail, Facebook, and Twitter.

Simply hovering your mouse over a message without actually opening it gives you options to quickly reply, retweet, delete, favorite or archive it. Click an email or Facebook message to open and read it.

Unbound: What You’re Following

The Unbound column displays your Twitter and Facebook feeds also in chronological sequence. You can filter the stream using the Facebook or Twitter tabs at the top. You can post your own Facebook status updates or Twitter tweets from within the box at the top.

The Chat tab in the Unbound column allows you to use Instant Messaging with your IM contacts.

Twitter Stream

The Twitter stream in the Unbound column shows pictures and videos inline. This allows you to play videos without leaving Threadsy.

Hovering your mouse over a tweet brings up quick Reply, ReTweet, and Favorite buttons.

Facebook Feed

Like many desktop clients, Threadsy has inbuilt support for interacting with your Facebook stream – without installing anything. You can like items, view comments and enter your own comments.

View Profiles Automatically

Whenever you click on a tweet or view an email message, Threadsy shows you a profile snapshot of the person in the right Unbound column. I found it a quick and easy way to connect with people on other networks. For example, here is a profile view of Kristen, one of our new writers at MakeUseOf:

Threadsy collects information from dozens of sites; and shows you a bio, recent photos, and recent status updates on Facebook and Twitter. This is incredibly useful as it provides the context for you to respond appropriately to the person. You can directly jump to the person’s profile on any of the listed networks to connect.

Want to start using Threadsy right away? Click this link to get an instant invite, exclusively for MakeUseOf readers. Don’t forget to give us your feedback in the comments!

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 3 Easy Steps to Lifestream with StoryTlr (3)
• Stay Socially Connected Online With Yoono (18)
• Have All Your Social Updates Collected & Sent With NutshellMail (1)
• Get Updates From All Your Social Networks With OrSiSo (4)
• 9 Steps To A Great Start In Friendfeed (12)

Readtwit is a 3-step service that will seamlessly integrates this aggregation power of the people you follow – into your RSS reader.

3 steps and you’re good to go

Readtwit, a new web service by Lionite does one simple thing – it captures weblinks from your Twitter stream and then publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading application to read it.

The process is composed of the three following steps:

• Go to Readtwit and press the big ‘Get fed‘ button.

• Allow Readtwit to access your Twitter account (no password needed).

• Choose your RSS reader (and if it’s not there click the ‘Get me the feed‘ button and paste the feed into your reader)

The image below displays the result: the original tweet and below it the full text, in Google Reader.

Information-overload preventing  features

Readtwit automatically prevents content duplication caused by retweets. It does that by grouping together similar links that are sent in the same time-frame. Once you’ve set up your RSS feed, you can further tweak Readtwit to prevent (or at least minimize) information overload.

First, you can filter out specific users. This feature will help you keep focused on useful content, as you can set it to not display links by people who post too much (and also exclude yourself, in order to not get back the links you post, as retweets).

If there are topics that do not interest you, it is possible to filter them out as well. In the image below, you can see that I have set Readtwit to not display iPhone related hashtags – as it does not interest me. I wish I could set this filter to my whole RSS stream, but at the moment I’ll have to do it only with my Twitter links.

Next, choose whether to get the full stories or just a summary and set the Feed update interval, which determines the amount of content you get.

Twitter as a human content-aggregator

Effectively, Readtwit closes a circle that turns Twitter into a human content aggregator. This is because you can now subscribe to top experts in your field of interest and get an RSS feed with the best content – chosen by them. You might even want to set up another Twitter account, one that will serve you only as a content source.

Future additions

The guys over at Readtwit are working on other additions for the service, among them are the followings:

• White-list filtering (Twitter username or hashtags) to include targeted content only.
• Filtering by popularity (over or under a certain threshold).
• Creation of specific feed types (technology, sports, politics etc.)
• Multiple feed management (with separate filters / content type)
• Feed analytics.

Follow @readtwitapp for further updates.

Check out Readtwit

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• LifeIO: Check Your Email, Read Feeds, Post to Twitter, Keep Notes & More From One Cool Site (26)
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• What is a FeedReader ? (19)
• Ways to Stay on Top of The News (13)

Why Lifestream?

There are different incentives for lifestreaming:

• Most people use lifestreaming to present a unified view of their online activities to their friends. Those who subscribe or view your lifestream do not need to visit different websites to see your pictures, writing, videos, etc. Your lifestream is your “Centralized Me” on the web.
• Lifestreaming is also a way to permanently backup your online data. Your tweets get archived automatically. Your photos get backed up, just in case. Your blog posts get backed up, in case your blog is hacked.
• Lifestreaming can be a way to maintain an active blog when you don’t always have time to write blog posts.
• Create “stories” about an event. Let’s say you went on a weekend trip during which you tweeted, uploaded a few photos to Flickr, and a video to YouTube. Your trip can be easily shared as a “story” without searching for the content on different sites.
• Some people use lifestreaming for personal recollection and memories. What did you do on the web on your last birthday or anniversary? Your lifestream will show it to you.

How do you start lifestreaming? Let’s find out.

#1: Add Sources for your Lifestream

After you sign up and verify your email address, set your time zone. You can then choose the sources to add to your lifestream. There are 16 sources supported, from Facebook, RSS Blog Feeds and Flickr/Picasa photos to Twitter, Last.fm/YouTube, and social bookmarking sites like SumbleUpon/Digg/Delicious.

You do not need to supply any passwords because StoryTlr will simply pick up what is already publicly available via your profile on the various services. With Twitter, you can hide your @replies so that conversational tweets don’t clutter your lifestream. Once StoryTlr has collected all your information you are ready to personalize your lifestream.

#2: Select a Theme

On the Configure > Design tab, you can choose a theme just like you do for a blog. There are 8 pre-built themes ready to be used.

You can also choose a custom background and header image.

#3: Select Pages

StoryTlr creates a full lifestream view, but also lets you create custom pages with filtered sources and more. Go to Configure > Pages, and choose the number and type of pages you would like on your site. A Dashboard page provides an overview of recent activities, while photo/video pages provide a gallery with slideshow.

You can drag and drop to change the order of the pages as you like. At any time, use the View tab to see how your website looks.

Your lifestream is ready! Use the View tab to see your lifestream. You can change your theme and tweak your pages any time you want. Your StoryTlr website is also like a blog – you can update your status Facebook style, write a blog post Blogger/Wordpress style and get comments on your posts.

For more advanced customization, see the next steps. All the following steps are optional.

#4: Customize Avatar and Widgets

It’s a good idea to display your own avatar and introduce yourself with a bio. Go to Configure > Profile to do this.

In the Configure > Widgets section, you can select which widgets to display in your sidebar. If you have setup your avatar, choose the Avatar and Profile widget.

#5: Create Stories

You can automatically “pluck out” a certain time period of your lifestream to create a story. This works best when you make a trip, attend a conference, go on vacation or attend an event like a wedding. On the StoryTell page, choose the time period and select the sources to build your story.

Some interesting events have been captured as stories in StoryTlr, like for example, the Hudson river plane crash story above.

#6: Advanced Customization

If you are geeky enough, there is more you can do with StoryTlr:

• Use your own domain (or subdomain) for your lifestream
• Setup Disqus commenting on your StoryTlr site
• Create your own CSS to customize your site
• Automatically cross-post your lifestream to Twitter

What are you waiting for? Go to StoryTlr and start lifestreaming! Oh, and don’t forget to share your lifestream and stories with us in the comments!

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Threadsy – Integrates Your Email and Social Networks (+Invites) (24)
• Have All Your Social Updates Collected & Sent With NutshellMail (1)
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Google Fast Flip is an online free news reader that’s about reading news online but in newspaper style. One look at the way Google Fast Flip operates and you will get the idea. Google already delivers news content via Google News. With this new Google Labs web application, Google is attempting to promote a different way to read news. Something to which we are more accustomed with our morning brew.

The visual way of reading news is supposed to be free news reader with a more intuitive and faster experience. A news portal loads elements like images, videos, podcasts and Flash ads. This slows down content delivery when all we want is just scan the headlines and move on to a news snippet of interest. Google Fast Flip tries to speed up this process by giving a way to ‘flip through’ pages in the manner of a newspaper without any time lags.

A Free News Reader That Combines the Best of Both Worlds

The official Google Blog says Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles.

In simple terms, Fast Flip is a cool visual way to flip through newspaper articles of the day. Readers can search for news content (searching after all is what’s Google all about!). The news content is brought to readers by a small galaxy (39 so far) of Google’s news partners. Most of them are media big leaguers like Washington Post, BBC News, New York Times, Newsweek, TechCrunch, Billboard, Esquire et.al. So at least content-wise, coverage spans across all categories from politics to sports.

The Google Fast Flip news reader page is arranged around four ‘views’. Think of it as ‘tags’ to access the news you want. Each shows thumbnails of the posts and clicking over the thumbnail loads a screenshot of the entire article. The thumbnail snapshots of the dynamic news content can be horizontally scrolled with left- and right-arrow keys.

• Popular is what’s hot and breaking. Follow what’s being recommended or most viewed across the news world.
• Sections are more like pages of specific news subjects like politics, world news, US news, sci-tech, sports, health, travel etc.
• Topics are just that, a subject matter that’s being discussed like Iran or Obama.
• Sources are the snapshots of news aggregated from the news/magazine websites.

These four can be arranged in any order by clicking upward and downward pointing little arrows.

According the Google Blog, a mobile version of the Fast Flip free news reader, with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, is also accessible at the same address.

Sharing news

Through this latest web application, Google is harping on the unexpected nature of news browsing. A serendipitous experience also plugged by a good word from friends and other members of the community. The stories can be shared by emailing it or clicking a Like It button that’s a public vote for a news item. Fast Flip users who are signed in to their Google Account can see which stories friends in their Gmail contact list have recommended.

Will it work?

This is still an experimental feature. At first glance, it doesn’t appear as trendsetting, an adjective Google is known for. Behind the façade, it is a news aggregator. That’s a corner populated by many others. To read the entire article or linked pieces one has to ultimately visit the source site. The snapshots are previews after all.

But yes, the ‘flow of news’ is very silken and to Google’s credit almost magazine-like. The browsing style sounds more of a fit for mobile devices. It’s an experimental feature, so if the flip way catches on we can expect improvements fast from Google.

Google Fast Flip is a slightly different way to read news. We all have our ways to do that offline and so it will be in the online world too. Give us your opinion.

Try the experimental Google Fast Flip.

Image Credit: Danard Vincente

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To Personalize News With ‘Custom Sections’ in Google News (8)
• Ways to Stay on Top of The News (13)
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• Newsflashr – Get All The News In One Place (0)

What does LifeIO bring in the already overcrowded space of web applications? Well, the concept itself is not exactly new, but the implementation is the one of the best I’ve seen so far. Integration is good when it’s done right. Think about Apple products – they all fit together from the hardware to software and support.

It’s much more convenient to have everything you need to manage your online social life in one place, especially if it does a great job at interfacing with all that information; allowing you to sift through stuff that you want to see. Having all the tools you need in a sleek one stop shop – how could you say no to that? LifeIo is the free, complete productivity suite for web 2.0.

LifeIO, like the name suggests, aims to be the bus on which information travels to and from you, hence IO(input/output), by aggregating your email, RSS, contacts, social networking accounts, calendar, tasks and even a basic note taking application. Add another couple of new features and applications in the mix, and you might be on your way to the online operating system.

Even more tech-oriented people will recognize that those types of apps represent 90% of the functionality you need day-to-day. A bit of polish here and there, integration with lightweight OS (Google Chrome OS?) via something like Mozilla Prism and you might have just stumbled on the next paradigm shift in computing.

Now that we’ve built up a bit of excitement about LifeOS, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The design is simple and straightforward; Mac OS users will notice that someone has been reading up on the Apple User Interface Development Guidelines. A bar at the top contains the list of available applications:

• Now – aggregates information from all the other applications and brings them together into one window. The user can then glance at the RSS feeds, email, upcoming calendar events and tasks without navigating to the respective application.
• Mail – will import email from the major service providers (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL) as well as standard POP mailboxes, so you can check your email online from anywhere. Unfortunately, the wizard will import your Gmail via POP by default, but you can manually set up IMAP if you wish. The interface is rather barebones at the moment, and represents a downgrade for someone used with Gmail’s filters, labels, add-ons and incredibly fast search function. That being said, Yahoo Mail users will be glad to have a responsive, simple interface to check email anywhere. A big plus is the preview function; just hover the mouse over a message and a (small font) text-only version of the message will pop up like a ‘Tool Tip’ or Growl notification.

  

• Calendar – nothing fancy, just straight-up usability. All the important features are covered. If you’re used to iCal or Google Cal, the switch couldn’t be easier.
• To-do – you’ve guessed it, it’s a task management application. While it certainly doesn’t compete with OmniFocus, it has more functionality than Google Tasks. It’s got Due Date fields, importance and categories.
• Notes – a stepchild of WordPad and TextEdit, it hasn’t got the functionality of Google Docs, but works for quick note taking.
• RSS reader – is essentially a clone of Google Reader, complete with the left sidebar and everything else you could expect. One hiccup though, the actual articles will open in a separate window instead of expanding inside the list.
• Social – a bit underpowered for now, the Social application currently will only integrate with Twitter. It lets you see your contact’s tweets and post your own. A few screenshots I saw of upcoming version include Flickr integration, and I’m sure that they will add more services with time.

  

• Shopping – a search + RSS subscribing features will make sure you’ll be always up to date with prices on Amazon, Craigslist, Yahoo, iTunes and Fandango.
• Settings – another striking resemblance with OS X, this app provides quick access to all available settings.

If you‘re like me, you’re getting worried just about now. LifeIO sounds cool, but can I trust it with my login information for Google, Twitter and maybe more? Bruce Specter is not new to the scene; he’s the guy that made Web Cal – Yahoo’s calendar program. Plus, everything is transferred via https.

How about a surprise? The first 50 users to sign up with this link will get into the private beta right now. For more cool web apps reviews, you should definitely check out this page.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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While Friendfeed does have many features and options, when you get to a good start and invest a little time to figure everything out you’ll see it’s not so complicated after all.  You might even save some time normally spent on Twitter, Facebook or reading blogs because you can do all of that on Friendfeed and replace some other services you are using – and have some fun and meet interesting people while doing it!

Sign up

Sign up easily on Friendfeed by entering your details or better yet sign in using your Google, Facebook or Twitter account. When you use Twitter it will import your data such as your avatar, description and username and even look to see which of your friends are already on Friendfeed.

If you don’t use any other account to sign up you can choose your first people to subscribe to on the suggested user list.

You can sign up directly or using an existing account.

Click “settings” in the upper right corner below your name and set your display name, username, description and avatar. Take some time to pick a nice photograph of yourself or any avatar that suits you because it will be next to anything you post.

Next you can tell Friendfeed when to notify you of any new messages or comments by e-mail, IM or the Friendfeed notifier. There are also themes but for now you can only choose one of the pre-made themes that only you will see to prevent the users from having a nauseating Myspace experience.

Add your feeds

The most obvious use of Friendfeed is to enter all your feeds to show others and view the feeds of your friends. Even if you only have something like a Twitter and Flickr account this can be useful because it’s an easy way to share your items and receive comments.

To add your service go to settings and click add/edit at services. There are currently 58 services available and you can also add any other service that has an RSS-feed such as your blog.

There are 58 services or you can any other RSS-feed

Find your friends and new people

Import from multiple sources

You can import your friends from other places or send them an invite e-mail. You can add a website or RSS-feed that is not on Friendfeed yet by adding them as an imaginary friend. Click “browse/edit friends” and “find friends” to see some suggested people who your friends are subscribed to.

You will quickly find some other interesting users by reading your Friendfeed and watching people there who aren’t your friend yet. Tip: strangers have a little white balloon next to them instead of your friend’s light-blue one. There are also people who make their own suggested user lists. I can highly recommend Louis Gray’s monthly lists.

Configure pushing items to twitter

You can make some items go to your Twitter followers. It’s very convenient and can replace some services such as Twitpic or Twitterfeed. You do want to set your preferences though because you don’t want to flood your followers. There’s also a check-mark next to any new item you post that lets you choose whether to post to Twitter or not.

Install the bookmarklet

If you install the Friendfeed bookmarklet you can open a little pop-up on any website that you visit to share it with your Friendfeed subscribers. Add images from the page by clicking on them, choose a group on Friendfeed to share it with and whether you want to send it to Twitter.

This makes sharing with people very easy and replaces some other bookmarklets that share to twitter. It works with most browsers since it’s a bookmark and not a plugin. Sending an e-mail to share@friendfeed.com will also post this to your feed. This is nice for sending pictures from your phone.

Reading your friendfeed

Now that you have some friends in your feed, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the layout.  First you’ll notice that there are people in there that you haven’t subscribed to yourself. These are FOAF (friend of a friend) items that your friends have liked or commented on. Below an item you can expand the comment and comment or like an item yourself. Liking makes an item show in the feed of your friends.

Interact as much as you can because this really is one of the best aspects of Friendfeed and makes you appear on other people’s feeds. Sharing an item with people on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit or Del.icio.us can be done by clicking “Share”. Hiding is an important feature because it helps you control the firehose of items. Click “Hide” to remove certain items out of your feed. I have hidden all items from Twitter without any comments or likes. See, that really creates some room in your feed. Clicking “Best of day” in the menu brings up the most discussed an liked items of your friends. So everybody’s “Best of day” is different.

Put your friends into lists

Another great way of controlling the flow is lists. You can add friends to multiple lists. You start out with “Favorites”, “Personal” and “Professional”. Your standard feed is called “Home feed”. I suggest putting everybody in your home feed and adding some people to your “Favorites” whose updates you don’t want to miss. If you subscribe to more people you can add lists for certain subjects, languages or ‘tryout’ favorites with people that can promote to your “favorites”. Every list has it’s own “Best of day” link at the bottom.

Try out the advanced search feature

The search feature is really useful but requires some getting used to. It has also replaced some features that had their own buttons so there really are many things you can do with it. For instance in the top search bar while on a page, type the beginning of a friend’s name to go to their feed.

Advanced search lets you really slice and dice all items on there. Want to find Flickr items with at least 15 likes? Or anything about the iPhone in your favorites list? No problem. Best thing is, you can save searches which then get a button in the sidebar and the results will update in real-time.

Join or create a group

In a group there are people who share an interest. It’s a great way to find some new active people to subscribe to. For instance there is an Apple group, a Friendfeed feedback group or a Movie review group.

You can also create a group about a subject that you’re passionate about. I have recently created the Nokia newsgroup. Another way to use groups is to create a private group with some friends or colleagues to collaborate and share and discuss items from the web.  The MakeUseOf group is for reading and discussing all the posts from MakeUseOf.

I hope this has helped people who haven’t joined Friendfeed yet and needed some questions answered first before taking the leap.   If you have any other Friendfeed questions not covered here, please leave them in the comments.

Image Credit : adKinn

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Threadsy – Integrates Your Email and Social Networks (+Invites) (24)
• Have All Your Social Updates Collected & Sent With NutshellMail (1)
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It is called Chromomulator. Chromomulator decides what’s hot (and therefore potentially interesting for you as well) by looking at what people are looking for. This is achieved by fetching the top trending topics from Google Trends.

Once it has the top 100 topics, Chromomulator aggregates news items, blog posts, pictures and videos about them from Google News, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Flickr and Youtube respectively — all into one convenient place.

So hop over to Chromomulator and you see the current top 100 Internet searches neatly laid out in two separate columns on each side of the webpage. Some of the topics are well suited for pictures and images, while other are not, so don’t be surprised if Flickr and YouTube do not return results for quite a few topics.

Chromomulator offers RSS feeds that help you stay atop of the trending topics or you could follow @chromomulator on Twitter.

Idea for the mashup is great, however there are a few chinks that are evident. First off by the looks of it, the trending topics appear to be from Google Trends (USA). While some of the trending topics would be the same all over the world in particular situations (think recent MJ searches), what about the trending topics “in your part of the world”? This is what I mean (trending topics for USA and India):

For best results, you need to refresh often (you can use ReloadEvery addon) because the ranked trending topic changes. If you haven’t refreshed from the time you last loaded the page, the results on Chromomulator will not reflect the true ranked trending topics on Google Trends. This was the one thing I found quite annoying: you click on a link hoping to read about Transformers because that is what the #X topic when you last loaded Chromomulator, instead you will be taken to details of what actually is #X on Google Trends currently.

That said, it a great idea and has a huge potential for expansion, it would be interesting to see how Chromomulator develops further. Meanwhile, you let us know what you think of Chromomulator’s results.

Does it capture what you would call the buzz? How do you stack it against Twitter or popurls as a tool for capturing the top Internet searches? Let us know in the comments.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Websites to Check Out Latest Buzz and Viral Videos (7)
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Me:            ”Not now.”

Twitter:     “New Direct Message!”

Me:           “I’ll get to you later.”

LinkedIn   “New Recommendation!”

Me:           “I can’t network right now, I’m working!”

Not to sound cliche, but has this ever happened to you? Between your different social networks, your friends, your colleagues, and that hottie barista at the Starbucks across the street, you can get overwhelmed with all these events. This is “social overload,” a close cousin to the plague known as “information overload”, during which you have no time for socializing, because you’re socializing.

Enter: NutshellMail, a service which currently consolidates messages from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as a huge number of email accounts, packs them up all nice and neat, and sends it all to your primary email, either on demand or on your desired schedule.

Once you’ve opened your account, you’ll have the chance to provide the names and passwords for your various accounts. Go ahead and add as many services as you want, even multiple accounts for a single service. Nutshell will manage them all.

Next, you’ll select the days and times on which to receive an update from Nutshell.

Your updates from NutshellMail will appear much like the above, based on the order you choose. Right now, your Twitter update is limited to the latest 20 updates, which may be sufficient, depending on the size of your follow-list.

You may also update your status or click a small button to ”boomerang” specific email messages to your primary email. This makes for a great way to keep up with a personal account from work, a work account from your personal email, a side account for a spam-trap, or even your child’s email and MySpace accounts (something we’ve had to consider just recently in my home).

At the top of the update message are quick links to request an “Update Now” message, which will send you your most-recent updates, up to the minute.

You may also elect not to receive updates at all, but instead to view all your messages in Nutshell’s inbox, which reminds me of the Outlook Web client.

Fuser is a previously-covered service which is similar to NutshellMail. Here are also five more social aggregators to keep you updated.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. I really must get back to networking.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Threadsy – Integrates Your Email and Social Networks (+Invites) (24)
• 9 Steps To A Great Start In Friendfeed (12)
• 3 Easy Steps to Lifestream with StoryTlr (3)
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As internet users gain more and more ways to communicate, they are looking for ways to centralize and bring things together. Fuser is one service that can help you keep your communications organized.

I first used Fuser about a year ago, and I must say I wasn’t impressed. I liked the concept, but the interface was frankly ugly and clunky, and I kept getting messages about my Java being out of date. In short, it was more trouble than it was worth. Recently, I decided to check back and see if anything had changed. It had, and it was definitely for the better. Fuser has a brand new interface that is far better than the old one, as well as some new features.

First, it should be understood that Fuser isn’t an email service, and it doesn’t provide you with a Fuser email address. For those of us overloaded with email accounts already, this is good news. Fuser is instead a communications dashboard that combines all your existing email addresses and social networking accounts together in one place. Signing up is extremely easy, as is adding all your accounts.

On your first login, you are greeted with a wizard that helps you add all your email and social networking accounts. It’s really easy, and you don’t have to worry about adding POP or IMAP settings for the most common email providers—Fuser does it for you. And for those of you who use email providers that don’t provide free POP or IMAP access, such as Yahoo or Hotmail, don’t worry about having to get a premium account; Fuser magically syncs them both ways with no problems.

Another interesting feature of Fuser is that it can synchronize folders across your email accounts. For example, if you create a folder in Fuser called “Family,” and you drag an email from Gmail and Yahoo into it, Fuser will automatically create a label called “Family” in Gmail and a “Family” folder in Yahoo and keep them in sync with each other. This feature might not appeal to everyone, but it is really useful for those who are serious about keeping everything centralized and in sync.

Also, Fuser has a built in conversation view, so if you’re a Gmail user, you won’t have to give up that feature if you start using Fuser.

In addition to your email accounts, you can also add your Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter accounts. The Twitter integration is one of my favorite Fuser features, and it has all the functions of the Twitter website. From Myspace and Facebook, Fuser syncs private messages and notifications. Unfortunately, you can’t see your news feed or post status updates—at least not yet.

In short, Fuser is a great way to bring all your email and social networking accounts together. It does just what it says it does, and does it well. While there are a few features I’d like to see and some small bugs here and there, Fuser shows a lot of promise. The Fuser team is very helpful and responsive, and they assure me many more great features are coming soon.

What about you? What features would you like to see? What services would you like to centralize?

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PeopleBrowsr, a clunkily-named service if ever there was one, is deceptively useful.  Essentially it is an aggregator for your social networks. PeopleBrowsr organizes different lists into columns that can be moved around horizontally. Even though you’re in a webpage, you’ll swear you’re using a desktop app with all the Ajax in the interface (relieving you of the need to reload your page).

It handles the following services:

* Twitter
* Flickr
* YouTube
* Seesmic
* identica
* LinkedIn
* Digg
* Photobucket
* Facebook
* and FriendFeed

The overall interface is a bit hard to describe from scratch, so here’s a visual:

The core of the service is a three-column interface that is completely customizable. By default, Twitter is the primary account, so all the options will be Twitter-centric at first. I believe that you MUST have a Twitter account to use the service at all, though I’m sure that once this moves out of alpha, that will change.

When viewing any particular service (in the above case, Twitter is selected), you will have a list of available windows to add on. Twitter, for instance, has “Everyone,” “Following,” and “Directs.”  Each of these will come up in their own separate column that can be scrolled to if more than three are on the screen.

In order to switch to another service, run your mouse over the PeopleBrowsr logo and select one of the services that pops up. Changing services will change the color palate of the template.  From there you can choose new columns and add them to those of the other services.  For instance, my screenshot above has Twitter, Digg, and YouTube all on the same page.

If you want to get rid of the menu bars, click the tiny “X” button in the upper-right corner. This is very handy for maximizing your screen real estate.  Note: To get back to the standard view, click the little white arrow in the upper corner. It can be a bit hard to find.

Clicking on either your own profile or someone else’s will bring up a profile window. This is very handy because you can quickly investigate any user and see all the social networks they are a part of. Also, it can be dragged around the screen with the Ajaxy goodness that I spoke of earlier. You can see their most recent posts as well as their profile and a Gallery View of their friends across the top.

What is the Gallery View you ask?  Well essentially it is a pictoral version of any group of people you select on PeopleBrowsr. Here you can see the people I’m following on Twitter. What makes PeopleBrowsr nice is that you can select not only logical groups like following and followers (or friends on Digg, or followers on FriendFeed…..etc), but you can often see more complex groupings, like Top Followers and Outbox (direct messages waiting to be sent). There are even options for custom groupings.

It’s hard to write an article about PeopleBrowsr, because every user will probably use a different part of it and set up their page in a totally unique way. The service will remember which columns or views you have set up so when you log into it again in the future, everything will already be there for you.

Right now the service is in “public alpha,” which can be translated into “tread lightly.” Often alphas are made private by developers because they don’t want bugginess to give their products a bad name. PeopleBrowsr has decided to go public, so if you do test it out, send them some feedback so they can make their beta a strong one!

Speaking of feedback, what do you think of this lovely little webapp? Tell us in the comments!

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So what makes Zenbe different? There are a lot of things, but here are the highlights.

First, Zenbe helps you centralize. Bring all your emails in one. It helps you cut down on your account clutter by bringing together in one window your email, task lists, files, and calendar. You can also use Zenbe to manage all your email addresses. It allows you to send from any email address and downloads outside email messages via POP.

Second, Zenbe has awesome features. What other email client do you know of that allows you to use Twitter and check your Facebook updates while reading your latest email? That’s just the beginning, though. Zenbe has a full featured calendar that includes support for iCal subscriptions, and, unlike some competitors (*cough* Google *cough*), the developers included task lists.

The file view is awesome, too. It takes all your email attachments and makes them available in their own separate tab. You can search, tag, star, or sort them by file type. Audio and video files can be played right in your browser, and images can be previewed in a neat lightbox.

In addition, Zenbe has partnered with Scribd for document previewing, so you can view documents without downloading them to your computer. You no longer have to email files to yourself, either, since Zenbe lets you upload files without emailing them. With 4GB of storage, there is plenty of space to use Zenbe as a repository for your important documents and media.

I’ve mentioned only some of Zenbe’s features. There are many more, and everything – from the contact manager to the tagging system – is innovative.

The best part about Zenbe, though, is that it’s still evolving. While other email providers will go months without any updates, Zenbe is constantly adding new features. For example, the Zenbe team is currently testing a unique conversation view, as well as an innovative “favorites inbox” that shows you emails from the people you care about most.

Zenbe really does have some of the best features I’ve seen in an email client. It incorporates them in an elegant way, too, so you aren’t overwhelmed with clutter.

What about you? What features would you like to see in the inbox of the future? Let us know in the comments.

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Hittery, as I mentioned, is a custom search dashboard with different search boxes on different subjects. It provides you with the best choices for topic-specific websites and search engines. If you go to the Hittery homepage, you’ll find a huge number of boxes with different names like Internet and Tech, Gadgets, TravelGuide, Weather, Stock Quotes and many more.

Most of these search engines search through big sites like Google, Digg, Youtube and eBay. However, Hittery has also included established and trusted websites like Wikipedia, Britannica, DailyMotion and many more in order to deliver most accurate results. In total, there are about 12,000 different websites which Hittery claims to have included in the custom search results.

There are two drop down menus in the Hittery homepage at the top which let you add more custom search engines and even normal search engines. There are many options available and you can choose to add them and diversify your search results on a particular topic. You could also click on ‘ show all custom search engines ‘ to get all the custom search boxes.

Now lets talk about the execution. Does Hittery deliver the required results ? Is it spot on target ? If you ask me, after playing with it for around 20 mins I’d say that it definitely works..and works really well. For example, I selected the ‘ Headlines and Papers ‘ custom search box (yeah, it seems to have all kinds of boxes ) and then searched for Barack Obama in that. The results were impressive. It immediately showed results from top news sources like CNN, Reuters, NY times and Chicago Tribune with the content related to Barack Obama.

You’ll see the search results on the left hand side with ads above them ( they aren’t obtrusive and probably a way to generate revenue for the site ) and on the right there’s a sidebar with more options.

The sidebar lets you do the following : -

1. Set the time frame for search results.

2. Search the query in a specific website like Google, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia or Live.

3. Add the custom search engine to iGoogle, Netvibes or Google Toolbar.

4. Suggest a site for inclusion in the results.

5. Check the latest news related to your query.

If you really love to narrow your search results to specific websites and like custom search engines then Hittery could be the ultimate choice for you. I’ve already saved it in my bookmarks toolbar and I’m sure I’ll visit it many times everyday.

By – Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog.

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In fact breaking news is in itself a fully fledged business on the internet and a huge number of blogs and websites work around the clock to get the news to its audience. Consequently, there are a huge number of news aggregators which claim to deliver the latest news to their visitors. Newsflashr is one such website which claims to be the all-in-one news search engine.

Newsflashr is like an aggregator of aggregators. It aggregates headlines from popular news-oriented sites like Google News, BBC News, MSNBC and even from sites like Techmeme, Technorati and Twitter. You just need to type your query into the search box and it’ll display the related news from sources on a single page.

When you hover your mouse over a particular headline, it pops up a box containing further details on that piece of news in 3-4 sentences. You can customize the number of headlines per feed but it doesn’t offer you the possibility to move the feeds or set them according to your priority.

Newsflashr offers two kind of views – ‘topic’ view and ‘feeds’ view. The feeds view, as you can see in the screenshot above, lets you scan specific news across various sites. However, in ‘topics’ view, it displays the current hot topics and shows news related to them sorted by time or sorted by the Alexa Rank of feeds.

It also offers a horizontal slider which can be used to adjust the freshness of the news within the timeframe of 1 to 7 hours. There’s also a tag cloud of popular headline topics which lets you choose your topic of interest and view the latest news related to that topic. There is also a bookmark (”Add This”) link which helps you to bookmark a story to the popular social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon and many more.

Hence Newsflashr could be an interesting site, especially for news lovers since it works towards eliminating the need to visit different news sources to check the news about the same topic.

Of course it needs improvements like more customization options and better ranking of feeds (currently Alexa is the only parameter which it considers while ranking the feeds). We can certainly expect more features on this site in the future. Till then try it out and let us know what do you think.

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog.

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In order to keep up with the social media phenomenon, there are numerous aggregation sites & applications popping up on a regular basis. It seems like most people are now using FriendFeed to stay updated with things but what about the other social aggregators out there that are less publicized? Do you use any of them?

I’ve joined my fair share of social aggregators but these are the 5 that stand out to me as far as being the most useful & beneficial. If there’s a different one that you prefer, please feel free to tell us about it in the comments.

Socialthing!

Socialthing is the social aggregator with the least features & only supports 13 sites (so far) but it seems to be growing more in popularity. It’s very personal in that you can only see your own lifestream & it doesn’t support friends, followers or subscribers; you can only see your friends from other sites (in your lifestream). From your lifestream you can reply (to microblog posts) & favorite items & it is sorted by person & site, in chronological order.

Whenever there are new updates for you to view, a message will show at the top letting you know that new updates are available. You can then choose to see them when you’re ready.

You can also use Socialthing! to post status updates to Facebook, Pownce & Twitter (for now).

Profilactic

Profilactic “is a social media aggregator/lifestreaming service that pulls together just about everything you and your friends create online” & supports a whopping 186 sites! One of the best things about Profilactic is that if there is a site that they don’t support, you can just add it in yourself.

On June 1, 2008 Profilactic created a partnership with Ping.fm, giving members the ability to post updates to 21 different sites at one time.

With Profilactic, not only do you get a lifestream but you also get a profile, you can add clippings, you can add friends & you can view your friends’ lifestreams.

Strands

Strands has quite a few unique features that makes it stand out from the rest of the social aggregators. It allows you to filter content by group (everyone, people who follow me, just me, mutual contacts), category (blogs & notes, images, music, bookmarks & more), date (today, last 7 days, last 30 days) & rating (liked, disliked, saved). These filters can be applied for the entire Strands community or for any individual member.

Two other unique features that can be seen for the entire community or just an individual member are the trendwatch & hot posts. Trendwatch shows the top sources & top categories for a person’s content & hot posts shows which user posts have the most activity (comments & ratings).

What really makes Strands stand out is their tracker, “a desktop application that tracks your listening behavior in your favorite media players and pops desktop notifications about your contacts’ activity even when you are not on Strands.”

Swurl

Swurl is a social aggregator that’s set up in a blog type format. Your home page shows all of your content in chronological order & without any type of site filtering. Your friends page lists all of your friends according to site (Digg, Twitter, Flickr, etc) along with your friends’ feed. The particular format of the home page & friends’ feed actually resembles FriendFeed & includes many of the same features.

Swurl also aims to stand out from the rest by providing you with a timeline of your content. The timeline is set up much like a calender, differentiating your content according to the type it is (status, link, blog, music & image). As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the timeline shows an actual album cover (if recognized) of the song you listened to & it also shows any image that you’ve uploaded.

Iminta

Iminta answers the question, “what are you inta?” & currently supports 34 sites. Iminta has a lot of the same features of the other social aggregators I’ve listed. Their best feature though, is the ability to filter content by as many sites as you want. You can filter content for just 1 site, 3 sites, 10 sites, it doesn’t matter & you can choose which sites you want the content filtered by. You can also filter the content by type (images, microblogs, songs, etc) & you can filter out your favorites only.

Iminta gives you 3 tabs to work with – recent comments, what your friends are inta & what you’re inta. You can manually add an inta as well. Plus, Iminta makes it easy to share your friends’ content by letting you email it or blog it.

Also, you can organize your friends into groups. Groups allow you to “quickly filter your views and RSS feeds for groups of friends & control which friends can see which things you are into.”

So now it’s over to you. Do you use any of these services? Or do you use any others? Let us know in the comments what you think of these or any other similar social aggregation services.

(By) Charnita is a social media addict & internet junkie. She blogs about web apps, internet tools, social networking, web 2.0 & internet marketing on her Social Web Tools blog.

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Friendfeed is a cool service no doubt and if you use certain Greasemonkey scripts (which I am about to mention), Friendfeed can turn into a really awesome tool. So if you haven’t been bitten by the Friendfeed frenzy yet, sign up for a free account and install these user scripts and start rocking with it!

1. Google Reader in Friendfeed

There are two ways to use Google Reader in Friendfeed. One is a bookmarklet which is suggested by Louis Gray and if you have signed in to your Friendfeed and clicked on the bookmarklet, it will immediately open the Friend’s shared items tab of your Google Reader.

Another way is to install this Greasemonkey script. Once installed, you will get a tab on the right which when clicked takes you to your Google Reader homepage (see the 2 screenshots below). There are many other similar scripts for different sites. However I particularly like this one.

If you’ve added Google Reader to your list of services, then while browsing through your feeds you could share the ones which you like and then start a discussion on them with your friends as they feeds appear in your Friendfeed.

2. Read Later

Read Later is a cool script for Friendfeed which allows you to store a particular Friendfeed item for reading later. Once you install this script you’ll see a small link named ‘Later‘ under each item.

Once you click on it, it is saved in your account and can be easily accessed through a separate Read Later Tab.

3. Better FriendFeed “subscribed to me”

The Better FriendFeed “subscribed to me” Greasemonkey script adds a ’subscribe’ button under each of the friends who are subscribed to you but you aren’t subscribed to them. Hence it makes the process of subscribing back to those who subscribe to your Friendfeed easier.

4. Twitter For Friendfeed

This is my favorite. The twitter for friendfeed script allows you to access Twitter right inside Friendfeed and therefore allows you to use both the tools simultaneously inside one browser tab. When you install it, you get a separate tab for Twitter inside Friendfeed (as you can see below ).

Once you click on the tab, you can access your Twitter account right inside your Friendfeed account!

5. Friendfeed Filters: Friends & Groups

The Friendfeed filter Greasemonkey script could turn out to be a very important Friendfeed addon in the long run. It lets you filter the noise and access the Friendfeed items which you care for. After installing it, you’ll find a drop-down menu on the right in your Friendfeed account.

Now from this drop down menu you can create different groups of friends and then access their Friendfeed items through a separate tab. It then allows you to further customize your Friendfeed. For example as you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve created a group and named it ‘ Tech Bloggers ‘ and accessing the group feeds through a separate tab.

6. Friendfeed Tweak Refresh Rate

Yes, probably the simplest of the Friendfeed scripts but certainly a useful one. The Friendfeed tweak refresh rate script lets you specify a time interval (in minutes) after which you’d like your Friendfeed to be auto-refreshed.

If you like Friendfeed then I’m sure you’ll like these scripts too. If you know about some other cool Friendfeed scripts then let us know in the comments. And most importantly, make sure to join MakeUseOf room on FriendFeed.

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Once you sign up for Retaggr, you must fill out a few different things in order to give Retaggr enough information to populate your Profile Card. This Profile Card isn’t just limited to screen names and basic information. There is a lot of room for customization.

First, you fill out your profile which consists of basic information about you, your work and your website. The real strength of Retaggr is in its ability to let you add links to your Profile Card for just about every social network under the sun. As someone that tries to connect with my readers in every way possible, I have so many profiles it can get hard to keep up with all of them. Retaggr allows me to show off all the ways to connect and interact with me in one place.

Retaggr has a total of 136 different websites or social networks that you can add to your profile. This was staggering to me, because I thought I used lots of social networks until I started looking through this list. If Retaggr doesn’t have your social network of choice, there is a place to add in any other profile you may have.

Widgets can also be a part of your signature. The main widgets they currently have allow people to instant message you directly from your Profile Card. This is fairly basic but there is a place that allows you to build your own widgets. This makes the possibilities almost limitless for your Profile Card and the information it contains.

One new feature on the site was the ability to make your Profile Card into an email signature. This is great because it includes all of the things you could want in your email signature and more.

Retaggr is a great tool for anyone that wants to connect with new people online. It provides enough information about the person and gives lots of different options to learn more about them and lists all the ways you can connect with them.

I can see the added value for bloggers and people that do business online. Describing Retaggr as an “interactive business card” couldn’t be a better description. You can now do more than just leave your website in a comment or leave a link to one or two profiles. Retaggr provides you with a clean profile that contains all the information any potential reader or buyer would need from you. Your Profile Card can be embedded into whereever you would like.

The only downside to Retaggr is that in order for it to work on comments and photos, the website must support it. I think Retaggr is something worth supporting but only time will tell if enough websites feel the same way I do.

Kyle Judkins is a 24 year old marketer and part-time tech blogger. He is the author of LostInTechnology where he talks about some basic technology tips and tricks that everyone can use.

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Considering the huge information overflow online, you can have some excellent tools which help you to effectively organize the information flow and help you stay informed and up to date everyday. Let’s take a look at some of them.

1. RSS

RSS or feeds as we like to call them is an amazing technology which lets you stay updated with various websites, blogs and journals in one place – your feed reader – which could be Google Reader, FeedDemon or any other one. We at Make Use Of love RSS and have published lots of posts up to now for RSS addicts. Do a search for “RSS” in our search engine and you’ll get all of them.

Assuming that most of the readers of this site already know all about RSS, those who’ve heard this term for the first time today (yes, believe it or not, RSS hasn’t gone mainstream yet ) should start making use of this technology immediately.

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the most useful services by Google, especially for those who care to stay informed online. Through Google Alerts you can monitor a specific term or phrase and check what people are saying about it. Read more about it here.

3. MonitorThis

MonitorThis is an effective online reputation management tool which lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds at the same time, for a particular search term. It includes all the main search engines including Delicious tag search and Flickr tag search.

4. Memes

Memes on the internet aggregate the information which quickly spreads from one blog/website to the other and present them in a river of news format. There are various such meme websites, the most famous of them being Techmeme, which aggregates the latest tech news from around the web. There is also RSSmeme which aggregates what people are sharing in their RSS readers.

5. DailyMe

I wrote an elaborate post on DailyMe sometime back and I think that it’s certainly one of the best personalized news aggregators available online which also boasts some nice features like the newspaper reading format.

6. FaveBot

FaveBot works like Google Alerts and lets you track your favorite keywords online. It allows you to monitor through various categories like blogs, books, DVD’s, events, music , podcasts, pictures and videos.

7. Twitter And Friendfeed

Both Twitter and Friendfeed, apart from from being cool ways to communicate and be social, also serve as a way to get the latest information about various events and happenings from all around the world.

Twitter also has its own version of Google Alerts called TweetBeep which alerts you via email when someone mentions a keyword on Twitter which you’ve flagged for attention.

What online tools do you use to organize your information flow and stay informed and up to date? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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A great solution I found was SecondBrain, a social media aggregation site. I’ve seen a few around the web, but I don’t think any of them offer as great features and as elegant presentation as SecondBrain. Since I love this site so much, I thought I’d invite you guys to take a look and sign up. You can even follow me if you like – my username is danielpataki.

Now, let’s see what SecondBrain can really do!

Setting up

After you’ve signed up and logged in, you can import your favorite services through the “Import Content” tab on your dashboard. You can choose from 19 services, including Picasa, Flickr, Youtube, Blogger, del.icio.us, favourites, StumbleUpon, and so much more. Other sources you can add content from is your hard drive (this was an unexpected one for me) and you can add links manually too.

Using SecondBrain

The main part of this service for me is the continuous wall of content I create and share with others. All your activities are listed here in chronological order, whether a Twitter, a Stumble or a shared Flickr picture. At the top, you can post text content directly to SecondBrain, but the coolest part is, if you use Twitter, you can also post to Twitter directly from here. A very unique part of SecondBrain is the ability to add Zoho documents, Google Docs documents, which I haven’t really seen anywhere else.

Once you have some entries and visit other people’s, things start to get really interesting. Through every entry you can visit the persons SecondBrain page, their relevant service page and you can comment on the entry. Once you get into the comments, you will have some more options, Flickr pics will be shown, screenshots of links will be available, and you will have the option to share or add stuff to your collection.

Your collections are tidbits from the net, but since this is an aggregation site, you aren’t limited to just links, or just photos. You can organize content from all the services available, in essence creating a true personal collection from the web. You can have multiple collections, which makes it that bit easier to view all your content.

You also have a library, which is a slightly expanded and searchable version of your wall. The search function is the most notable here, it is one of the best I’ve seen so far. Since SecondBrain imports tags, it not only searches by content, but by tags as well. If you search for the word “technology”, you get a list of all such posts. However, at the top, you also get a tag breakdown showing you the number of results which match the tag “technology”, but also the list of different tags. This is a very easy way to specify content you want to find when you don’t really know exactly what you’re looking for.

Is SecondBrain worth it?

The question I always ask myself is if a service is worth it. I know a host of services which I really do like, but I need to put too much input into it to be of real value to me and others. However, in the case of SecondBrain, I will be using it for a long, long time to come.

I have two big arguments for this service, the lesser of the two is that it is totally automatic. If you set it up and never touch it afterwards, you will still have an automatically nicely organized aggregation of your social life. There is no need to send constant updates, since your activities on other sites are the updates.

The second argument is that it is oh so much simpler than anything else I’ve seen so far. You don’t have to go to six different places to keep in touch with others content, all you need to do is log into your account, and find them on SecondBrain. You will see all their updates as they happen, and never miss a thing.

My third bonus argument is that there are a lot of added, small features I haven’t talked about. You can view your (and others’) updates via RSS feeds as well, there are favorites, options for public and private collections and the list goes on and on. Services are also being added continuously, so if you don’t see all your favorites, don’t worry, they might be in soon.

There are some areas where SecondBrain still needs to improve, but I’m confident they will. Support for adding generic RSS feeds is not in there which is a big problem, since support for blogs is also limited. If you have a Wordpress.com or Blogger blog you’re ok, but if you host your blog on your own domain you won’t find any options for sharing your posts. Nevertheless, I am now never giving up SecondBrain. It’s perfect for managing your content on your own or connecting to dozens of people.

(By) Daniel Pataki is the writer of Hack Your Day, his productivity blog and founder of Blogtastique, a blog management service. I feel like I’m leading three lives at once, I’m even too tired to continue using third person here!”

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• Psst…Do You Plurk? (21)
• 5 Social Aggregators To Keep you Updated (10)
• Threadsy – Integrates Your Email and Social Networks (+Invites) (24)
• Social Networking Sites that I Make Use Of (7)
• Retaggr Lets People Know Who You Are (10)

An example of an audio podcast is Make Use Of’s own podcast. The real confusion sets in with the term ‘podcasting’. Despite the word “pod,” you do not need an iPod or any type of special device although you could use any device that supports mp3 files. So the big question lies in what is the best way to subscribe to your podcasts. The program you would use to subscribe is called a ‘feedreader’, ‘aggregator’, or ‘podcatcher’ and these are among my favorite recommendations for this.

Miro – This is my favorite client. Miro by default runs in your system tray to periodically download your subscribed podcasts as new episodes are available. When you open the program, it displays the Miro Guide which is a great directory of podcasts by categories. When you subscribe to podcasts, they list in the left sidebar and display the appropriate album art next to its name creating a clean organized list that is also capable of utilizing folders for more elaborate organization.

Miro is free, open source, cross platform, and perhaps its most unique feature is BitTorrent support which allows Peer-2-Peer podcast downloads rather than the traditional Server-Client downloads.

iTunes – This option is the most common option and mainly where podcast downloading originally began. The podcast subscription feature is a feature of the iTunes Music Store which makes it a little more difficult to figure out and not quite as straightforward. However just about every podcast is listed in its podcast directory.

iTunes, unlike Miro, does not minimize to the system tray forcing you to have the iTunes application open if you want to download episodes of podcasts. If you do have an iPod and that is how you listen to podcasts then you will want to use iTunes as podcasts download automatically to your iPod when you sync it with iTunes as you normally would.

Juice – This option is another open source solution. It is cross platform and has a very simple look. The interface is not as elegant as the others but offers a very straightforward method to download the podcasts you want. Unlike iTunes, Juice is an application intended specifically for podcasts and functions much like an RSS text feed reader.

What do you use for podcast subscriptions? Please let us know in the comments.

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US,a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

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• Readtwit – Turn Links in Twitter Tweets into an RSS Feed (8)
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• How to Subscribe to & Download Only Podcasts That You’ll Like (2)
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• Feedly – A New Firefox Start Page Addon You Can’t Afford To Miss (12)

Nick mentioned Feedly in the comments of this Make Use Of article and the fact that it’s just a Firefox extension caught my eye. I checked it out immediately and I was pleasantly surprised. Feedly is like a browser start page – but it works from your local computer. It’s touted as a social and magazine-like start page and I must say it lives up to its name.

Once you install the Feedly Firefox extension from here and restart Firefox, you can load the Feedly start page by clicking on the Feedly icon on the toolbar.

What you’ll see is a neat page that asks you if you want to synchronize with your Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed and other web 2.0 accounts. If you ask Feedly to connect with Google Reader or Bloglines, it will then load a copy of your OPML file that contains a list of RSS feeds you read from there – you need not essentially subscribe to every one of them manually on Feedly. If you’ve got it integrated with Twitter, it lets you tweet about articles on your start page. Similarly, many other services can be integrated.

The cover page lists new and unread items from your subscribed blogs as you can see from the screenshot below. The page looks like a magazine cover. Fancy stuff to love.

There’s another tab called What’s New that lists items based on your reading patterns. Your Google Reader contacts and their recommendations are available from here too, and they rank higher on this page.

You can click on the tweet button near an article to share it with your Twitter followers (of course, you should have told Feedly about your Twitter account initially):

There’s a preview button you can click and the web page of that item opens in a page in popup, as you can see here:

To mark an item for reading later, click ‘Save for Later’. To share an item, click ‘Recommend’. You can also click on the ‘Annotate’ link to quote an item and share it on Google Reader, NewsGator online, etc.

There’s a search bar on top that lets you search and find articles from sites that you’ve favourited.

Oh and did I mention that by clicking on the screensaver link on the top right, you get a cool view of what’s new on your reading list. Articles appear and vanish one by one and you can click on the title to read/save it for later. Have a look:

Final Thoughts

Feedly is simply AWESOME. I tried it for about an hour, and it seems that I’ve fallen in love with the tool. It’s slick, fast and simply works out of the box, I found no niggles.

The fact that it integrates with many of my other accounts like Twitter, FriendFeed and more and being able to share items with my friends without being on Google Reader is making me love Feedly even more.

There’s a Feedly content API as well. What that means is that developers can easily build on top of the tool and make plenty of tools for the same (the cover page and the screensaver tool for Feedly exist due to the API). I’m waiting for something exciting from here.

What are your views? Did you try Feedly, or will you still stick to the traditional about:blank and Google Reader? Drop a comment and kick off a debate!

(By) Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old blogger and freelance writer from India. He writes about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips.

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• Access Your Websites Quickly With Firefox’s Fast Dial (15)
• Welcome to My Firefox: Extensions, Themes, Setup (14)
• Watch Videos In The Firefox Sidebar With YouPlayer (16)
• Ubiquity – Extend Firefox and Improve your Browsing Experience (9)
• The Winners of ‘Extend Firefox’ – Best Firefox Addons (14)

However, DailyMe does things differently and has a lot of interesting features too. It’s free to use and you just need to register and create your account. Once you create your account, it then takes you to the page where you can choose categories based on the subjects you like, the sources of content such as specific newspapers or publications or based on specific keywords which you like.

DailyMe has licensing agreements with top publications and blogs such as the Chicago Tribune, Engadget and so on, which means that it can display their entire content on the customized homepage.

After you customize your content, you are done and then you can choose the delivery options.

DailyMe has some pros and cons which I have listed below.

Pros

1: The biggest advantage is that it usually displays the full content from the sources because it has licensing agreements with the publications. Hence you don’t need to read partial stuff and then go to the original link.

2: It provides a nice customized homepage too, where you can read all your stuff in newspaper style. Here’s my DailyMe Homepage in the screenshot below.

3: It also gives various delivery options such as email, RSS feeds and even a PDF file which will contain all the content.

4: It also has a desktop client through which you can set automated printing of the content.

Cons

1: The page refreshes every time when you add a category to your selections. This can be annoying sometimes.

2: On the customized homepage, it has a separate section for each keyword. Therefore if you add many keywords then you need to go to separate pages to check the content. However if you only opt for email delivery and do not intend to check the homepage, then you won’t face this issue.

Overall, I found DailyMe to be impressive and its certainly a nice way to stay up-to-date.

Which personalized news aggregator do you use for your daily news fix?

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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• Newsflashr – Get All The News In One Place (0)
• Google Fast Flip – Call It A New(s) Reading Experience (6)
• Discover the Hottest Top Internet Searches with Chromomulator (9)
• Zenbe – All Your Emails In One Place (20)
• What are you lookin’ at? Cool Sites To Feed Your Photo Fetish (8)

When I first heard of Friendfeed, I will admit I rolled my eyes and moved onto the next site. But gradually I was won around by the positive reviews that the site received so I went back for a second look. On my third visit, I made an account. Now I’m handing out my personal feed to anyone that wants it.

The site basically aggregates all of the networks that you use into one easy to use page that anyone can then follow. If your friends use Friendfeed, you can have their account activity merged with yours. Once a day or once a week, you can have everything emailed to you. So if you use say ten different social networks, instead of checking those ten different sites individually (which take up a lot of time), your friends now only have one site to check. If they use a RSS reader, it can all be instantly funnelled in there as well.

No passwords are asked for so your online security is assured. By simply entering your usernames, you can bring together your online activity from 28 networks.

All of your activity for these services will then be imported. Then when you use one of these services, that information is immediately passed to Friendfeed who then update your page with the link and any comments you may have made on that site :

So it goes without saying that if you want to keep something private, don’t do it on an account associated with Friendfeed because everything you do on a Friendfeed-linked account is going to show up pretty much right away – comments, photos, links, the whole lot. But the benefits outweigh any possible privacy concerns. Most of your online activity can be brought together under one umbrella, you can monitor your friends and this all in turn can save you an enormous amount of time which can make you more productive.

The URL that Friendfeed gives you is also a simple one to remember. It’s basically http://friendfeed.com/YOURUSERNAME and is helpful for handing out to family and friends. There’s no long complicated URL’s to remember, no chance of re-directing your mother to a “Rate my Booty” website.

You might also want to check out Steve Rubel’s excellent post on making Friendfeed your master aggregator. Steve highlights how you can set up “imaginary friends” to collect information from sources that don’t have Friendfeed accounts. So there’s all sorts of possibilities you can throw around to see what sticks.

Do you have a Friendfeed? What do you think of the service?

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

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• 5 Social Aggregators To Keep you Updated (10)
• The 19+ Social Network Aggregator List (19)
• Retaggr Lets People Know Who You Are (10)
• Manage your Online Social Life with SecondBrain (12)
• 9 Steps To A Great Start In Friendfeed (12)

Two very useful and time-saving web services I use for this purpose are Only2Clicks, which was profiled on MakeUseOf before, and Hyperigo, both of which allow you to organize your favorite websites on one tab-supported page. They come equipped with a few token sample offerings in place, but both are easily customizable for the main purpose: adding your own stuff!

With either Only2Clicks and Hyperigo, you can add or upload any of your bookmarks and they will be displayed as small screenshots of the actual sites themselves, usually 15 to 18 to a page.

Recently I came across another couple of sites which are similar in principle to Only2Clicks and Hyperigo.

AllMyFaves – calls itself a “visual directory” and contains countless visual links (icons) to most popular sites within dozens of categories. You probably frequent mots of them on a regular basis, thus the slogan, “why search?” This is just a random sampling of the “Entertainment” tab, and there are other tabs as well, for Shopping, Travel, etc.

Each tab lists relevant sub-categories, i.e. of Finance, E-Trade, Magazines, News, Compare, Shopping, Photo, Movies, Music, Web Radio, Astrology, Dating, Games, Chat, Blog, Voip, Instant Message, Insurance, Courier, Health, etc. Pretty extensive.

AllMyFaves continues to be a “work in progress” as it even has a “Weekly Faves” report of all the new sites found each week. Plus even though it is not currently customizable, it is expected to be in the future. The site suggests that AllMyFaves can be used as a Start Page, and it would no doubt be a good one, but for me it is better suited as a shortcut on my desktop for now.

After all, it contains links to many of the shortcuts on my desktop already! If yours is anything like mine, you’ll be able to replace several of them with the one, saving yourself a little time searching.

Symbaloo – Unlike the above, Symbaloo also aggregates essential search tools on one page. Seach for weather, phone numbers, address locations, dictionary search, videos, recipes, eBay auctions and so on. Symbaloo also supports tabbed browsing and drag’n drop interface. Apart from search engines, it allows you to add websites, feeds, email accounts (ex. Gmail), radio channels, etc. [Video demo]

Finally if you’re looking for a startpage-like online feedreader then go straight to Netvibes.

And, as usual, if you know of any similar or better concepts, let us know!

(By) From the non-geek perspective of Linda Martin-Peoples, author of CoolOnlineTools, MyBlognosis and a few other sites scattered across the web. Linda lives with her husband and two cats just outside of beautiful Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

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• Hittery – Awesome Custom Search Startpage (7)
• Get Your Online Profiles Organized With PeopleBrowsr (9)
• Feedly – A New Firefox Start Page Addon You Can’t Afford To Miss (12)
• Zenbe – All Your Emails In One Place (20)
• What is Netvibes ? (7)

FINANCES

Mint – Get control of your budget and finances with minimal effort. Mint is a fully-automated, all-in-one online personal finance tracker.

Here are some of the things that Mint can do without your intervention:

• Track and organize your spendings by category (utilities, grocery shopping, entertainment, etc.).
• Alert you about the account payment due dates.
• Analyze your credit card and bank accounts and tell you if there are any better (more rewarding) alternatives.

It’s also quite secure. You can read a detailed Mint review here.

FRIENDS

Spokeo – One tool to keep track of all your friends from over 30 major networks. No matter whether they are on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr or Myspace, Spokeo will find and monitor their profiles for you. As soon as there is something new on their accounts you will see it.

Again, Spokeo is fully automatic and takes about a minute to setup. More on Spokeo.

TIME

RescueTime – Ever wonder how do you spend your PC time? How much time do you spend checking your email account, socializin’ on Facebook, watching movies, etc.? RescueTime can help you find it out. Once installed, it tracks all running programs and logs all visited websites, and afterwards presents that information in an easy-to-digest graphs. Available both for Mac and Windows PCs.

GOALS

43Things – It’s a new year, so probably you made some resolutions and set a number of new goals. Regardless of how big or small your goals are, 43things can make it easier to get there. It’s a very active online community where you can set, track and share your goals. For instance, if you set your mind to pay off your credit card debt by the end of the year, 43things will not only connect you with other folks who plan to do the same but also with people who did it. It’s simple, fun, and most importantly it works.

On the other hand, if you need something less social than check out our jumbo comparison of To-Do managers.

WELL-BEING

iRateMyDay – Find out how happy you are and measure overall well-being by rating your days for a certain period of time. Just select most suitable mood face for the day (from Great to Worst) and add an optional comment. Do it for a couple of month and you’ll be able to see how many days on average you felt great, terrible, indifferent and so on.

By looking at points that are well below or above the average you can also get a summary of ups and downs of the month. What went wrong? What was great? and What can I possibly change to improve it?

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• Save Money and Track Your Finances with Mint (25)
• BillMonk – Track Shared Bills among Friends (5)
• TAS – Free Easy To Use Financial Accounting Software (19)
• SimpleD Budget – Free Budget Tracker Software (Windows) (9)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)

Here’s my list of some of the popular and most anticipated Web 2.0 sites that are still in private beta, but already have a pretty large following!

	Hulu is probably the one site I’ve heard the most about lately and that looks to have the most promise. Imagine being able to watch any of the most popular TV shows online for free including Heroes, Bones, 24, and the late night shows also! Plus all of the shows are in pretty good quality. It’s video on demand plus video sharing. It will also include shows from Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance, etc
	Jooce is another very cool looking service that will help bring the desktop to the web, also called a web operating system. Basically, it’ll look just like your local desktop, but all of the processing, software installation, etc will take place on the server, thus freeing your local computer resources. As of right now, they have an IM client, file uploader, file sharing features and a few media players. Eventually, though, it will have photo editing apps, and office suite, and more! Jooce came out of private beat only couple of days ago.
	Adobe Cocomo is are components being developed by Adobe that will allow for real-time collaboration across web apps. If you haven’t played around with Adobe Buzzword, definitely check it out because Cocomo will add cool features to that such as real-time chat while you write documents and a shares real-time whiteboard.
	Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that aggregates all of your inbound and outbound activity online and manages it in one place. Other services like this are Tumblr and FriendFeed. It’s like an RSS reader and a social network rolled into one product. As more information is gathered from your online activity, a fuller profile is created.
	Xobni takes the effort out of organizing, searching, and navigating your email. It extends your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) program and email client (Microsoft Outlook, etc.) by adding additional sidebar menu. View sender profile for each email (contact details, phone nr., social networking profiles, sent attachments, etc.), threaded conversations, extremely quick search, and more. [Video Demo]

Are you looking out for some other site to come out of private betta that you think will be even better? Go ahead and post a comment to let us know!

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Being the type of guy that burns through money I jumped at the opportunity to review Mint. Mint is a finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money or Quicken. But the main difference is it is Online – if you don’t have a problem adding your banking information to Mint.com you can have access to a complete financial overview from any web browser.

Mint has been in Beta for about 3 months now and is showing somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 early adopters throwing in over 2 billion dollars of their hard earned accounts into Mint’s databases. 2 fricking billion dollars? That’s a lot of moolah…

I jumped right in, after thoroughly checking out the website and its history. I couldn’t just give my info to anyone – right? They have their security and safety information posted here (this should calm you down a bit). But, I was immediately impressed. It allowed me to add 2 Credit Cards and all my accounts from HSBC in 4 or 5 clicks. It has some 1500 institutions in its system so it can grab your transactions with ease.

Now that my information was in the system Mint can give me a detailed analysis of where my duckets are going. Obviously there are some things that the program can not discern like all those cash withdrawals for your trees and late night escapades … They will still show up as No Category. I think that is better for all of us – don’t you J. But your overview of all your accounts is DOPE. You can set low balance warnings per account and other alerts as well.

I noticed that Mint says it can save me money. I was extremely interested in how they were going to save me almost 2 grand a year… Sadly enough the info behind this was WRONG. Mint thought my HSBC savings account was 0% interest when it is actually almost 5.3%. So that part was way off. But to be fair they are still in Beta. And if my accounts were not interest baring this could have been VERY helpful.

All right and now for some of its short comings. I have YEARS of back financial data and I could not import it into Mint. It would only take data from financial institutions directly. So for the security freaks and data mongers this isn’t for you. I also had issues with some of the description editing for transactions coming in. They cut off intuitive descriptions for crap that didn’t make much sense…To really use it as is I would need to create a gajillion renaming rules.

As I was finalizing my review I got an email from Mint letting me know that my AmEx bill was due in 14 days, the balances and due dates on all my accounts. That was DOPE. I like it even more now. I’m glad I got that in! AskTheAdmin gives Mint two thumbs up!

The big financial apps should take a few notes on what Mint is doing because if they don’t they are going to be out of business!

For some simpler expense trackers check out previously posted 15 Tools for Easy Expense Tracking and Budgeting.

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• SimpleD Budget – Free Budget Tracker Software (Windows) (9)
• Manage Your Money Safely with ClearCheckbook (7)
• 5 Tracking Apps to Help You Out in 2008 (11)
• Use BudgetSketch To Make A Household Budget That Works (25)
• TAS – Free Easy To Use Financial Accounting Software (19)

	A very cool site that’s a mashup of deals from other sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, Gottadeal and lots more. Mostly tech-related stuff, but there are other things also.
	A site created by a University of California student that lists out a bunch of great deals on everything from tech to shoes daily. This site is very simple and is addicting.
	The nice thing about this site (and others) is that you can subscribe to the RSS feed to quickly find deals. Also, pictures of the items are included in the feed. This site also gives you info on rebates and coupons in addition to just deals.
	DealDump is an aggregate of multiple deal sites, covering everything from Woot.com to DealOverFlow. There are a lot of sites on here I had never even heard of before, so you might find something good here.
	Find the hottest deals on gadgets, computers, electronics, cameras, and lots more. The cool thing about this site is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for the specific item you’re looking for.
	Takes the same concept of Digg.com and does it for deals. Users vote for the best deals and the ones with the most votes get on to the front page. Also once you join you can enter to win free stuff, etc.
	As you can probably tell from the name of the site, Techdeals.net is all about tech stuff likes games, MP3 players, digital cameras, computers and more. It’s updated daily and has a good number of items.
	An online service that helps shoppers find coupons and hot deals for tons of online stores. It has a very clean interface and is one of the best sites for just finding coupons! Definitely check it out.
	Not your normal deal-finding site! This site is basically a social shopping deals site, complete with a game show host and a good number of great products. You’ll have to check it out yourself to find out.
	DealItem is another deal site for mostly tech stuff. It works best when you’re searching for something by model # or by make and features. If you know what you’re looking for, check out DealItem.
	A social bargain hunting site that changes frequently during the day, so you’re looking at new stuff all the time. Again, its based on a peer voting system that brings the best deals to the front page.
	SlickDeals is one of the better known deal sites and includes everything from tech gadgets to men’s shirts. They also have over 800 coupons that you can use at your favorite stores. Very clean interface and easy to use web site.
	Finally, GottaDeal.com is very popular site for finding deals and coupons online. Has a bunch of categories and brings in deals from many of the major retailers such as Apple, AT&T, and CompUSA.

So that’s about 13 deal sites that I could think of that have gained some popularity over the last couple of years. If you know of more that you think are good or better, go ahead and post it in the comments! Enjoy!

(By) Aseem Kishore is an IT Systems Analyst and Tech blogger. Visit his blog @ Online-Tech-Tips.com.

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• The Top 10 Grocery Coupon Websites for Cheapskates (62)
• FreshBargains : All-in-one Deals Search Engine (5)
• 5 Online Shopping Sites That Will Actually SAVE You Money (42)
• Watch Online Products for Price Drops with ShoppingNotes (9)
• Top 10 Sites To Find The Hot Selling Items On eBay (19)

1. 8Hands
2. Ex.plode.us
3. Fuser
4. HypeIt
5. Minggl
6. MyLifeBrand
7. Naymz
8. OtherEgo
9. Profilactic
10. Profileomat
11. Profilefly
12. Profilelinker
13. Snag
14. Socialnetwork.in
15. Socialurl
16. Spokeo
17. Tabber
18. Upscoop
19. Zoolit

COMMENTERS! Please help choose the top 5 of the following Social Network Aggregator Sites by basing your votes on the following criteria:

• A) Actual Amount of Networks Supported - we’re looking for 1 of these to be the 1 we use, otherwise we’ll need a Social Network Aggregator Aggregator
• B) Actual Functionality of the Integrated Networks – I obviously just don’t want to see all my friends from all my networks and then that’s that, I want more!
• C) Ease of Use – Could the 12 year olds on Facebook and MySpace work it?
• D) Trustworthy Status -will the site accidentally lose all your usernames and passwords
• E) Aesthetics – Does it look sexy?

(By)This article was posted by Adam Hirsch from TheFattyTalks

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• Retaggr Lets People Know Who You Are (10)
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• Legacy Locker – Life Insurance for Your Online Identity (4)