Threadsy is making me a better person

Every so often there comes along an application that not only quenches your thirst for something “Oooh, Shinay!!!”, but also shows how inefficient you’ve been with all of your time online. You start seeing email and social networks in a totally different way than you did before, and you wonder why the entire world is not using  the app right now.

OK, so maybe a application like that doesn’t come around at all. Unless, of course, you’d just recently found out about threadsy, like I did a few days ago. In the same way that Google wants you to think they reinvented email when they announced Google Wave, Threadsy actually has. And it’s taken everything inside of me to keep testing the service (to try and find flaws) before I spew my love for it across the interwebs.

I can hold back no longer.

Threadsy: A Better Twitter/Facebook/Email Client

When I first heard about threadsy last year, and signed up for their beta testing program, I was unimpressed. At the time I thought it was just one more Twitter and email client that would clutter my life, and for that matter, it was. In defense of threadsy, I wasn’t very active on Twitter or Facebook at the time and I didn’t really like the idea of my email forwarding to a third-party (and subsequently logging into both Gmail and Threadsy to see duplicate messages). Bottom line: I just didn’t get it.

Fast-forward to today when I have 4 Twitter accounts, 2 emails and manage 3 Facebook pages. You can see where my life may be a bit over-extended. I have been searching high and low for a twitter client that was not only clean and easy to use, but also managed multiple accounts extremely well. Hootsuite couldn’t do it, CoTweet isn’t quite there, Tap11 is too expensive, TweetDeck is too bloated, Flock doesn’t allow multiple accounts, and I don’t want to spend my entire life on my Palm Pre with BadKitty or TweetMe (been there, done that).

Where the other services failed, threadsy picked up the slack… and then some.

Pull Your (Social-)Self Together

But threadsy is not just another Twitter client. It’s an email client, a Social CRM, an instant messenger and a communications assistant. I can chat with my friends, family members and colleagues in whatever way they are available without even opening a new tab, and I can see a lot more information about them while I do it.

This is what I mean:

On the left side you see your ‘Inbound’ inbox, where every email from your multiple accounts, any message or wall post from Facebook, and any DM or @Mention on Twitter is listed for quick access and management. I can archive items, I can ‘favorite’ them for later, I can do a quick reply and I can throw everything away.

When you look on the right side, you’ll see that’s where all the real magic happens. Sure, it looks like any ordinary stream, but it’s a bit more than that. Images and Vimeo videos are embedded directly into the stream, any action that you might take with a message there gives you a quick action box immediately below the item (for replying, RTing and more). If you integrate Facebook, you get a few more features added as well (i.e. the ‘Like’, ‘Dislike’ and ‘Love’ buttons). But that’s still only the half of it.

While looking at your inbox, click on a message that was sent to you and look to the right of the screen. This is what I mean by ‘Social CRM’. You are now looking at all of the social media profiles, contact details, photographs, websites and status updates from all of their accounts. You can quickly send them a message or click the ‘more’ button to see their professional resumé. Oh, and click on one of their photos… I dare you.

Lastly, their search features are amazing. You can search your entire Inbound feed, which means all of your email, twitter and facebook accounts, or just search one of them on the left side. If you need an in-depth look at trends or Twitter results, do a search on the right side (and even manage the custom searches that you created in the past). Can it get much better than that? Why yes, it can….

What Could Be Better?

For everything that the developers of threadsy are doing right, there are still some things that they could do better. Here is my feature request list:

1. Allow me to add a new tab to the top of the page for specific accounts, groups, searches or whatever else I might want to add there. See Hootsuite for a good example of this.
2. Distinguish Private Messages from Public Messages a bit more so that I don’t mistakenly send a private message to the world. Perhaps by making it a slightly different color and removing the public reply button and replacing it with the private reply button (especially with Twitter inbound messages, where you just add the small ‘dm’ button to the left of where I normally click to reply).
3. Let me group people how I want them (perhaps also integrate Twitter Lists)
4. Show conversation threads inline (like in Gmail for email, Hootsuite for Twitter, or Facebook in general). You are called ‘threadsy’, after all.
5. When new messages come into the stream, and I am reading a message in that stream, the message I am reading is pushed down to make room for the new messages. I would like to either have a setting where I manually update the feed or the stream scrolls down to where I just was so that I don’t lose my place. Automatically scrolling down would also be useful when I click ‘Reply’ on a long message to bring me down to the reply box below the item.
6. Would love LinkedIn and Flickr integration for the streams.
7. Allow me to add more information to my connections (like notes or contact details) for those people that aren’t using the same email address across all of their social networks (for people that do this, we can’t see all of their network details in the ‘People’ viewer)
8. Add Klout score into profiles. It’s an interesting stat that I like to keep track of.

But besides that, I can’t ask for much else. With all of the time that the developers of threadsy have put into this (just listen to the notification sounds! they’re great!) I can’t imagine that they aren’t listening and making updates as you read this. Which brings me to my last point; get on threadsy and try it out. If you’re a communications nut like I am, you won’t regret it. Be sure to tell me what you like or dislike in the comments below.