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?

Foursquare is a social networking service that provides a pretty interesting spin on location sharing, microblogging, and gaming. According to Co-Founder Dennis Crowley:

“I think Foursquare found some kind of sweet spot between the intersection of social utility (Hey, I know where my friends are), sharing/oversharing (I log everywhere I go/everything I do) and gaming/rewards (every check-in gives you a little piece of candy).”

The unique nature of Foursquare is what’s also addicting about it. Not only are you simply sharing your location with your friends, but you earn points for doing so. It becomes a friendly competition. You’re also able to easily hook up with friends who may already be out and get recommendations and To Do items that you should do at any specific venue. Foursquare has an iPhone app, but also works via mobile web browser and even SMS.

The key to leveraging Foursquare for your business lies in the way it promotes and advertises your business. A user visiting your venue on a regular basis can earn a Mayor badge for visiting more than other users. This is where the competition comes in and is only one example of the types of badges available. Not only is the user’s location broadcast on Foursquare, but users can link up both Twitter and Facebook. This increases the visibility of your business across the web.

The next step here is to take an active role in getting customers into your spot using Foursquare. The groundwork is already there, but what can you do to entice users to visit you more often? The answer lies in increasing the incentive for users to compete for your attention. Give them free stuff! It’s just that simple. When users see that the simple act of checking in at your business can win them free stuff, the game becomes more interesting for them. It also increases customer loyalty and gives them a sense of ownership.

If you take care of your Foursquare users, Foursquare will call attention to your business. Users who have checked in at nearby locations will be notified that your business gives special treatment to Foursquare users. Some examples of deals you could offer include:

• Simply acknowledge the mayor. Everyone loves to see their name up on a wall.
• Offer a free drink to a customer who has visited 10x.
• Give the mayor (the person who has visited more than any other user) a free order of fries.
• Provide a discount on an eyebrow waxing to someone who has visited for the 4th time this month.

I think you get the point here. The possibilities are endless and if you’re looking for a new and exciting way to promote your  business Foursquare might be just what you’re looking for.

Are you currently using Foursquare for your business? Not sure how you could leverage it to build your customer base? Leave a comment.

Brizzly is yet another up-and-coming Twitter web interface. It’s currently in private beta and packs some very interesting features. First of those features being that it was created by ex-googlers and you can usually expect to be impressed where Google refugees are involved. This is also the same team that created Plinky.

Mute Specific Users

Do you follow anyone that just tweets a little too much at times, dominating your feed and completely burying everyone else? Or maybe someone who feels the need to live tweet every episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta (don’t act, you know you watch it)? Some of these overtweeters usually post good stuff, so you don’t really want to unfollow completely. With Brizzly, you can just temporarily mute that person.

Groups

A staple of any respectable Twitter client. Even if you don’t follow that many people, being able to group them can only make things easier for you. Brizzly allows you to create and view different groups from the sidebar. You can also add someone to a group or create a new group via the menu that pops up when you hover their photo. While Brizzly does handle this pretty well, I think the number of actions it takes to put someone in a group could be reduced.

Saved Searches

This isn’t actually a Brizzly-specific feature and Twitter recently implemented this natively, but Brizzly does use the Twitter API to keep your saved searches in sync with your Twitter account and to pull in any searches you’ve already created via the Twitter home page.

Inline Media

This is one of my favorite features and, until you’ve actually experienced it, you have no idea what you’re missing. All those random Twitpic, Yfrog, Flickr, etc. that you have to click on to view? What if the photo was just sitting right there in your stream? Brizzly does that. It also automatically embeds video from YouTube and Vimeo. It’s such a time saver when you don’t have to leave your stream to watch a quick video or simply look at an image. You can also upload images directly to Brizzly to tweet them.

Descriptive Trends

Most of the time, we have no clue what certain trending topics mean. Even if you recognize a name or topic, you still probably aren’t sure

why they’re trending. Brizzly provides descriptions for trending topics so you don’t get left in the dark. If you find a description to be innacurate, you can correct it. You can also click “search” next to any topic to view results on that topic and add it to your saved searches.

Other features include multiple accounts and direct message notifications, which appear in the upper right and you either View them or Ssh them. Brizzly is looking pretty good so far. I won’t be making it my default client yet, but it definitely has the makings of a strong competitor in that area. Currently, you need an invite, so go to the home page and request yours. If you’re already on Brizzly, what do you think so far?

The holiday season is coming and tech companies are scrambling to get out their latest and greatest just in time for the holiday rush. Nokia, the largest smartphone maker, is attempting to claw its way to the heap of the pack with the N97 mini, the newest edition to the N97 series. Described as the N97’s little brother, the 4.4 x2 x0.5 inch device is only slighter smaller than the original.

Aside from the redesign, the mini comes with some solid features including a 3.2-inch touchscreen display with 16:9 widescreen and 640 x 360p resolution. The phone also takes some decent still images thanks to the 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss Tessar lens with autofocus and flash. It also captures video 640 x 480 pixels at up to 30 fps and supports RealVideo and Flash Lite 3.0.

But the real buzz behind this phone is the partnership between Nokia and Facebook. Thanks to the deal, the mini will be the first phone to feature Lifecasting with Ovi. The app is Facebook widget that allows users to update both their location and Facebook status from the homepage as well as upload photos, much to the delight to all you oversharers out there (you know who you are). Travel junkies will enjoy the premium access to Lonely Planet, Michelin and Wcities. Lonely Planet gives users 155,500 points of interest via Lonely Planet guides while Michelin and Wcities gives you the scoop on the best restaurants. To further personalize the homepage experience, app addicts can check out the Ovi store to keep things interesting.

The mini comes with a music player with a built-in equalizer to get your music just right and has approximately 28 hours of music playback time. Talk time weighs in at a respectable 7.1 hours and 3.5 hours for video playback. There is 8GB of internal storage but it can be expanded up 24GB with a 16GB microSD card.

While it’s not the mythical iPhone killer that Apple’s rival companies yearn for like the One Ring, it is a solid competitor in the smartphone market that makes it a worthwhile purchase.

Michael Lang always finds the most obscure yet compelling and exciting videos for his site BlackDigerati.org. Last week, I posted one I found on his site featuring a young woman discussing how she uses her mobile phone to access the Internet and social networks (I use my T-Mobile). I noted that her video was submitted to PBS Frontline’s Your Digital Nation Project, which is a part of a larger multimedia project, Digital Nation, that involves social media, broadcast media and technology. It is interactive and honestly, quite brilliant because it invites viewers to submit video testimonies of their use of digital media. (I think it’s smart any time you posit users as experts.) Watch these very brief videos recorded at BlogHer 09.

This video from 2007 is an interview prominent researcher and Digital Divide expert Dr. Eszter Hargittai did on Chicago Tonight speaking on possible structure issues early on with social media. For example, why early on did more whites tend to use Facebook than minorities? She makes a good point that perhaps the reason why so many minorities were late to accessing social media sites like Facebook is because at one point Facebook was only open to certain majority white universities and colleges and was later opened up to everyone else. Check out the video below:

(via Black Digerati @BlackDigerati)

Yoono has been around for quite a while as the Firefox plugin that helps you simplify your online social life. Now, they’ve created a desktop client which is not based on Adobe AIR. Quite refreshing to see. I’ve actually been back and forth with Yoono and it’s developers for over a year, providing feedback as a user. I haven’t used it constantly, but I’m thoroughly impressed with they’re latest upgrades to the service and software.

As I’ve talked about before, being able to keep up with and process all the information coming at us is like ice skating uphill. Yoono was one of the many products I tried off and on to help deal with the situation and it has definitely grown up a lot. The interface is clean and easy to look at. It’s more intuitive and a lot snappier.

It’s easy to add your social networks and IM accounts to Yoono. Once you’ve done that, you’ll get almost realtime notifications for new

updates from all your services. You can turn off audio notifications and you can also pick and choose what type of updates trigger a visual growl-like alert in the bottom-right corner of your screen.

Instead of Adobe AIR, Yoono chose to use xulrunner to create their desktop client. Starting out as a Firefox add-on, it only made sense to port to xulrunner. This means that it basically has full browser functionality. By default, clicking a link in Yoono will open pages within it’s own internal browser. This could actually help you stay productive as it can help separate your social media activity from the real work going on in your browser. In any case, you can easily modify this behavior to open links in your own default browser.

Another nice addition to Yoono is integration with the realtime search engine OneRiot. Get all the latest news from across the social web in realtime right from your Yoono sidebar. Also, easily share links images and video across all your social networks. When you update your status in Yoono, you get to select exactly which services it should go to. Choose from Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, AIM, and FriendFeed.

OneRiot has  just closed their Series C round of $7 million led by Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital. You may recall us mentioning this real-time search engine in a recent post about the new Digsby.

OneRiot delivers realtime web search results to millions of users, both at OneRiot.com and to 3rd parties who utilize OneRiot’s Search API. The company will use proceeds of this funding to further enhance its core search product and to support its fast-growing partner network.

That partner network is quite impressive. Besides Digsby and now Yoono, OneRiot also has partnered with Yahoo and Microsoft, who recently released a version of Internet Explorer bundled with OneRiot realtime search. It seems that OneRiot is definitely on the road to success.

Using their PulseRank system (something like Google’s Pagerank, but for the real-time web), OneRiot helps you locate the hottest news, stories and videos that people are buzzing about right now on any topic. It pulls in links and content in realtime from services like Twitter and Digg. They also manage their own panel of 3 million users who have opted in to share their realtime information with the service.

OneRiot has taken an interesting path thus far. Rather than trying to pad their service with feature after feature and going through a bunch of redesigns, they have chosen to focus on their backend. They offer a rich API which allows 3rd party developers to easily integrate OneRiot into their offerings. They have focused on creating partnerships with various companies. They have kept the service pretty simple since their launch in 2008. It makes me think they somehow got a hold of Twitter’s playbook.

While I don’t really see a good use for it personally, I can see where it could be a valuable tool for others. As far as real-time goes, I’m used to the fire hose of FriendFeed and you just don’t get that same thing on OneRiot. Maybe if they decide to index services besides just Twitter and Digg, that will change. For now, looks like OneRiot is on the up-and-up. I wonder how they plan to monetize this.

We caught up with the Urban League’s CEO Marc Morial to discuss the company’s usage of social media to communicatate and connect with urban communities. Currently the company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts have been used primarily to promote the Urban League’s news and events. Morial would like to refocus their social media efforts to affect change from the  grassroot level.

Enjoy!

Saturday, June at 12:01 AM, Facebook users will be able to choose custom usernames for their pages. For the first time, everyday users will be able to brand the url of their pages in the same manner as corporate entities. The obvious benefit of this, is that it makes it easier to pass along your information with a name that is easier to remember than the current id number system.

The drawback this social networking giant faces is the same one posed to just about any e-mail company that gains popularity: Names are available on a first come, first served basis. This can be frustrating to people with common first and last names, like “Joe Smith” or “Bob Jones.” These folks might want to log in at midnight on the dot, and cross their fingers for luck.

For people with uncommon names, I doubt that they will have anything to worry about. Never before has it been more beneficial to have parents who just decided to make up some crazy name for their child. For example, my friend O.J. (not THAT O.J.) told me about a woman who named her daughter “La-a”(pronounced La-DASH-Aa).

If you laugh, the terrorists win.

I doubt La-a will have any problems getting her own name on Facebook, even if she waits 12 years to sign up. The other problem with this system is that it is certain that some people will choose the most ridiculous and offensive names possible, just because that’s what a large number of people do on the internet when given absolute freedom of expression!

All name issues and silly attempts at username humor aside, this should be a convenient way to keep tabs on your Facebook account, and let people know where you are without making them do a search for your name and sort through the results.