September 25, 2007

Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place

Mark Hendrickson

36 comments »

Another product that aims to simplify your digital lifestyle is launching today. Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.

Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.

Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.

Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.

Fuser is free and supported by discreet AdSense advertisements. Check out Orgoo for another message aggregation service. Orgoo, which presented at TechCrunch40 last week, differs from Fuser by integrating instant messages, video conferences, and SMS messages instead of data from social networking accounts.

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Comments

Cease & Desists should be arriving in 10…9…8…7…

 
 

Enough of this social networking crap , surely their must be more outthere than social neworking and facecrap

http://vsworxx.wordpress.com/

 

Goo 10 years ago: “Enough of this E-bay and Amazon crap, no one wants to buy anything on the internet.”

 

Seo contest test of zanzara mannara in Izzyweb.it
Thank you !!

 

Yet another social network aggregator ( YASNA ). How many companies are going to build a business model on top of Carnegie Mellon’s “Social Stream”?

http://www.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/M-H...../index.php

To this particular effort, I do like the “leader board”.

 

This looks interesting…. I’ll have to give it a test run.

 

The licence says this:

9.2 License……By posting Content to any area of the Fuser Services, you grant to Fuser an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), and otherwise use or exploit Content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing…..

Unless I’ve misunderstood it that means by synching your accounts with them you’re automatically committing your private comms to some kind of Creative Commons licence? So if I’m working on a draft of a short story or journalistic article - just by synching with this service I put it, irrevocably, into the public commons? I don’t think so!

 

I am not sure that the solution to having too many messages from too many places is to put them all in one place, where the spam can mix with the personal and with business email. One problem with email is that everything with high and low priority are mixed together. Another problem is that we are all simply overwhelmed with information. I am not sure how aggregating messages helps either issue.

 

If that works the way it says in the article then I guess that the Fuser Inbox kind of think will be jumbled up with messages and mails. Is that something you really want to have?

 

Aren’t there about 27,491 sites that do this now? Love the creative new ideas being introduced everyday.

 

It would be great if it meshed with Gmail, because Gmail lets you go ahead and mix spam with real mail with no fear: it separates it nearly 100% perfectly every time.

Add a login and protect pages for members only

 
former NC beauty queen - September 25th, 2007 at 8:19 am PDT

I thought email was dead but it seems this site turns everything back into email. Long live email!

 

sites like these are probably against the terms of use of all the major social networking sites anyway, because they want people to have to log into their site to get messages…which is completely inefficient

 

Very interesting. I would indeed save time using this and get a better overview instead of navigating back and forth from one site to the other.

Only the ‘giving access’ to my accounts makes me a little hesitant.

Egbert

 

I am wondering how to plays with the infamous facebook TOS… you are not allowed to store ANY information from facebook externally… bum bum bum :-D

 

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the write up on Fuser. We are psyched to be in open beta. One point of clarification, we support webmail as well as POP3 and IMAP email, which makes us a bit different than most email aggregators out there.

To RDSC’s comment, that clause refers to things that users write in “Fuser services” — like our forums and blog — but does not refer to your personal content (email, social networking messages, posts, etc). We take security very seriously at Fuser, and have no access to any of your personal content. We realize this is a bit confusing, so thank you for bringing it to our attention!

Thanks for all the comments — we’re looking forward to hearing everyone’s feedback!

Thanks,
Emily

 

Hey Emily, you said “…and have no access to any of your personal content.”

Hmmm - so you are saying that NOBODY there in your office can access to your database where all of the usernames and passwords are stored, and stored Unencrypted I might add, because the 3rd party sites which you hand them off too expect them to be unencrypted.

Uhh, is that what you are saying?

 

Social networks
Are so much fun
I don’t want to miss out
So I join every one.

Upload photos
Invite everyone I know
List my favorite bands
Troll for hottie ‘hos.

Now I can get notified
All at once - kablam!
Of all my friend invites
And girls with web cams.

Three cheers for Fuser
I shield them from any scorn
With all the time I save
I get to surf more porn

 

@Michael Bailey — All credentials that Fuser users give us are stored encrypted in our database. Of course, a select group of Fuser employees has access to that database, but we’ve taken in-depth measures to protect it from inside attacks. We take security very seriously, and have had our security mechanisms audited (both white and black box testing) by a well-known third party security firm.

 

Thanks for responding Emily, and as a developer myself, it’s reassuring to see other companies taking the required steps to protect information.

Best of luck to you and your team in the years ahead.

 

Michael Bailey, Stop whining like you are somebody, no one cares about your emails anyway..

 
 

It is an interesting concept but who knows how many people will feel comfortable sharing their information with this site.

 

Disclaimer: I know the Jared Polis, the founder, but I haven’t talked with him about Fuser.

Jared has made a ton of money off “dumb,” me-too ideas. To wit: BlueMountain.com and ProFlowers.com. So I’m not inclined to bet against him.

And by a “ton,” I’m actually understating it. We’re talking dump trucks full.

 

Fuser seems like a useful tool for accessing your Facebook and MySpace messages.

Grouply (www.grouply.com), now in open beta, allows you to access all your Yahoo Groups (and soon Google Groups and other groups) in one place with a much better user experience. You receive a Grouply Smart Digest email each day that summarizes activity across all your groups, highlighting what’s interesting to you and hiding what’s not so you can keep up with your groups in 80% less time.

Grouply adds a number of new collaborative features to Yahoo Groups, effectively converting these old-style email lists into vibrant and interactive social networks.

Please give Grouply a try and let us know what you think!

Mark Robins
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply
feedback@grouply.com

 

Interesting that the article makes mention of Orgoo. That’s been vapourware for so long and it’s something I’d actually find useful; a site to aggregate all my disparate IMAP/webmail accounts so I can get at them from other places.

 

@Andy You should definitely check out Fuser. We handle IMAP, POP and a plethora of webmail providers today, and we’re working hard to add support for more email and social web communications.

 

The Myspace and Facebook in-house counsels are writing their cease and desist letters as we speak.

 

as Michael Hoffman wrote-
“I am not sure that the solution to having too many messages from too many places is to put them all in one place, where the spam can mix with the personal and with business email.”
I couldn’t agree more. I use 8hands for my social needs and the great thing about it is that my email account is ‘bacn’ free. I get all my notifications to my desktop on real-time.

 

Hmm. Now they have to compete with established email services in UX and functionality, just to keep-up. Not to mention re-inventing others’ wheel.

I don’t see why somebody will be motivated to use it.

 

I have visited your site 478-times

 
 

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