Threadsy Helps You Pull Yourself Together

Threadsy is a service that allows you to access your Facebook, Twitter, and email all from one slick interface. It’s quite similar to FriendBinder with a few major differences. The design is simple: on one side, you have all your inboxes from the services you’ve plugged in, including your email, Facebook messages, Twitter DM’s, and Mentions. On the other you see your Twitter feed and Facebook notifications.

The Good

Threadsy makes it simple to keep track of all your accounts at once. It’s very convenient to go to one place and see everything. No need to login to multiple sites. This could be a valuable tool for power users as well as novice users who might be overwhelmed by multiple web interfaces. The actual interface is simple and intuitive. Hovering over an item shows you additional choices based on the type of item it is. Each item also has a service icon to remind you where it came from. Twitter DM’s have a separate icon from Mentions to avoid confusion.

The Bad

As with FriendBinder and other similar services, you have to give Threadsy your credentials for services that involved most of your online life. This immediately turns off most users. There is really no way around this, but Threadsy could step their game up a little and use oAuth for Twitter. Facebook authentication works as expected, so you’re not really giving Threadsy your password in that case. As far as your email accounts go, I don’t think there is any more secure method of authentication there.

Another issue I ran into is that Threadsy has no groups or other methods for breaking your stream up into consumable pieces. I follow over 2000 people on Twitter alone and don’t bother with any client that doesn’t have groups because it’s impossible to catch everything otherwise. Even FriendBinder allows you to give each person a priority level to break things up. If you get a lot of email, DM’s, or Facebook messages, I’m just not sure that Threadsy will make things more useful for you.

Conclusions

Threadsy is still in private beta, so I didn’t expect it to be perfect. I actually like it a lot. The potential is there for it to be a powerful tool for many types of users. Because they’re bringing so many different types of services together in one place, they will need to also bring together those features from each service that make it easy to manage the data. Things like groups, shortcut keys, and possibly columns in some form or fashion would make it much more useful.

Are you using Threadsy yet? How do you like it?