Right now, I have the following “communication accounts”: ISP-based e-mail, Yahoo, GMail (2), PlanetEye, Skype, Facebook
All these accounts mean it’s a challenge making sure I check every one on a regular basis, although GMail is a very good tool for receiving all your e-mail messages and being able to send messages using different e-mail addresses. But what about Skype and Facebook, which are becoming increasingly popular communications tools? In the past couple of weeks, for example, the number of Facebook messages has really grown – mostly because people say it’s a convenient and easy way to keep in touch.
Given this communication challenge, I started looking around for a single service/application that could handle all my accounts. After a healthy search, I found Fuser, which bills itself as “the coolest way to unify your mail from multiple accounts. View your mail and social networking messages in one convenient location.”
After spending a bit of time configuring several accounts (Facebook, GMail, PlanetEye), Fuser started to download all my messages. Of course, this took awhile given I have about 2,800 GMail messages given serves as a way to backup everything.
Finally, I was able to see Fuser in action. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised – nice, clean interface and, as promised, it delivered every account (other than Skype). So far, so good until I logged into my Gmail account only to discover that I had been cut off for 24 hours for breach of terms. To their credit, Fuser provided a quick explanation. Apparently, Google is “sensitive to how you access your account” so there have been a few situations where it locks people out for a short people of time – mostly when you’re logged into both services.
That’s a fair enough explanation but it was, nevertheless, disappointing. Still, Fuser has a lot of potential for people looking for an all-in-one communications solutions. The only fear is that Google will enhance GMail to include Facebook messages.
More: Facebook just announced its has improved its messaging service so you can now use normal e-mail addresses, which means more people will likely use Facebook as the places to read/send messages/email. Larry Borsato describes the move as “dumb” while AllFacebook – the blog for all Facebook, all the time – said once Facebook adds search functionality, he’ll start to use its messaging system even more.
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3 Comments
I emailed a link to Fuser to you a month or two ago. It could have saved you the searching! I briefly played around with it a while ago and thought it was pretty good. I’ve integrated most of my email accounts (three of them) into Thunderbird with IMAP, so that has been my solution.
I’m using Thunderbird as well so maybe there’s a Facebook extension out there.
Hey Mark,
You wouldn’t happen to have a beta invite for Fuser would you?
t