For many people, the web has fallen prey to information overload — from RSS readers to Email to social networks, we’ve all got vast amounts of data coming in at any given time, oftentimes to entirely different places. Many services have sprung up to try to tackle this problem, including FriendFeed, but most of them don’t even try to integrate Email. LifeIO is a new startup launching today in private beta that’s trying to do it all, with integration of Email, calendars, and your social networks. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to visit this link will be able to grab an invite.
lifeIO is meant to serve as a control panel for all of your communication, featuring tabs for Email, calendar, note taking, social sites, and RSS — in other words, a one-stop-shop where you can conduct the vast majority of your online activities. That’s a lot of personal information to store in one place, but fortunately everything is encrypted and transferred via a secure HTTPS connection. Features are broken into broad sections, like ‘Social’ and ‘Email’, which you can jump between using a slim menu bar at the top of the screen. The site does a good job keeping things consistent — navigation within a section is always done on the left side of the screen, with the content itself appearing in the middle (it works similarly to most desktop mail clients, like Outlook). Finally, the right portion of the screen is always dedicated to the lifeIO MyStream, which provides a real-time stream of new blog posts and notices as they come in. It can be a lot of content to absorb, but fortunately lifeIO lets you customize which items appear at a given time.
The ‘Social’ tab is reserved for services like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace (the number of supported services is actually quite limited right now, but more are on the way). One possible workaround if you’re looking to import as many services as possible: simply import your FriendFeed RSS feed. This social information, along with your Email, makes the site’s search feature potentially very powerful. Other features include the ability to chat with your buddies on most common protocols, including AIM and MSN, and a ‘Shopping’ section that lets you persistently monitor search results for a certain product.
The site has some good ideas — I especially like the real-time stream of new content that shows as new blog posts are appearing from my RSS feeds. But there are definitely some usabililty issues to work out before the site launches to the public. For one, the site needs another layer of polish: feeds and search results appear as unnecessarily large boxes (these would be great if they included extra content, like images from the article they linked to, but they’re fairly empty). And navigation can become a bit confusing at times. And perhaps most important: the mail client still has a very long ways to go before it will be able to match Gmail’s interface, which is going to be key if the site is going to draw any hardcore users. All of that said, lifeIO is still in very early stages, and we can likely expect some major improvements in the future.
Disclosure: lifeIO was a sponsor at our August Capital party earlier this month.
With a nice open API, these guys should rock it. Been waiting for someone to jump on this with some success. Surprised the open source community hasn’t come up with something like this sooner.
I’m not so sure. This faces all the problems that FriendFeed is facing and more. What is that? Not many people use more than a couple of services. My wife is perfectly happy with Facebook. Will this woo her? Doubtful.
So robert, in your opinion, what killer set of features would draw the masses from FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook?
What would make (say) your “perfectly happy wife” ditch her existing Social Network for a new one?
you might try thinking of lifeIO as a personal information platform. sort of like the swiss army knife of web apps. you might not use all the “blades” all the time but it comes in handy.
not life changing, yet. i’ll keep playing.
unique, err wait…
doesnt work. says invalid code for that email
the invites went very quickly,
please send a message to support@lifeio.com subject “invite” and we’ll get one out to you.
LifeIO is Fugly!
Getting an error when using the code….is it already expired?
I’m getting this same error.
I missed a free invite..;-;
I managed to get into the program, and I’m not all that impressed. The layout is confusing at best and the only social networking site it supports is Twitter.
I see no real reason to use it as of yet.
It’s still very much a work in progress, but I think something like this — provided it had a great Email and RSS reader — would be quite useful. It might come from lifeIO, it might come from someone else.
Yes, but such a service will only be successful when launched during a time when people feel comfortable giving 3rd party access to their e-mail accounts.
I’m not saying that’s never going to happen, as already (including myself), people are giving access to their Twitter and other social networking sites to Friendfeed and similar services. But still, social networking is one thing; private e-mails are another.
Well nothing big missed then I guess
I was however excited for this service and was expecting a lot.
Innovative? Game changing? Useful? Not really. Unless there is some hidden strategy afoot, I truly wonder what the point of this is. Sure I can see some great uses for some of the underlying technology, but not in this form.
I am geeting the error. Looks like the invite expired
Until they add more features and improve on their interface, I’ll continue to use Netvibes.
“lifeIO is still in very early stages”
Actually, it’s not. LifeIO was being developed back as far as 2005. Do your homework.
Glad to see these guys launch. I remember seeing them talk about LifeIO back in 2006. Still have the t-shirt
Invitation code “techcrunch09″ is not valid for this email address.
It seems that the invite expired
If the service is as bad as their invitation system… Still getting the same error as just about everybody.
It’s not a tumor! I mean error. We just ran out of invites really quickly!
I got an error too, looks like I missed the invite.
Even though I’m only part of a few social networks, it would be nice to have them all in one place. A tool like life io has the potential to make managing communication so much easier.
Email in the same place as social networks and RSS… not really useful, and possible security issues sketch me out a bit. I agree with John there, e-mail definitely raises more privacy concerns than social networks.
Still, can’t knock it till I’ve tried it. I’ll probably check out life io if I get a chance.
Is the problem really that people don’t have a one-stop-shop for content? Or is the derth of sh*itty content the problem?
Invalid code!!
Any other codes??
no more social sites for me !I am already busy.
I definately need something like this in my life right now. I am having to remember, and check up on waaaaay too many feeds, websites, and emails. By the time I remember to check all of them, half my day is over.
I think the ecentral idea is a good one, in that it solves a real and growing problem. In fact, i was thinking just recently that such a service was needed.
This is little use to people with only 1 or 2 accounts. But if you have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and god knows what else, in addition to subscribing to blogs and fave websites, being able to pull everything into one place is a real boon- you only need to log into 1 account daily.
Executuion may or may not be good, but the idea solves a problem created by the internet itself.
There is certainly an advantage in pulling everything together into a centralized dashboard. I could easily see a marketing team taking advantage of this. But I would suggest it eases a growing problem rather than solving it. At least two ideas spring to mind that would better resolve this issue.
Ugh. They make you enter all your information before they tell you that the invitation code isn’t valid.
invites went very quickly. please send mail to support@lifeio.com and we’ll send you one.
After entering email:
“thanks for your interest! we’ll email you when lifeio is available”
Yeah annoying. Put up a “apologies, all techcrunch invites used” I reckon.
It all depends on the user experience, if they crack that then it will be a good service.
I think too many startups let ppl in too soon. We only have one chance to make a first impression. Don’t throw it away…
the invites went very quickly. please send mail to support@lifeio.com subject “invite” and we’ll get one to you right away.
In any case it looks very promising. It would be also nice if lifeio.com could manage multiple (or maybe 2, in case this can be abused) accounts in the same service. There are many people that have for example a personal gmailaccount together with a second one for doing business.
lifeIO can aggregate as many email/chat accounts as you wish. just go to the setup icon in the top menu bar and click on “mail & chat” to set up your accounts.
So ahhhh no more invites? Kinda lame…..
Seems a good contact manager with email, rss, and social media tools should be made. the closest thing is Outlook and lets face it Outlook sucks!
This app will be in the deadpool unless the makers get really creative.
please send mail to support@lifeio.com subject “invite” and we’ll get an invite to you.
This seems very similar to http://www.Zooloo.com, another site TechCrunch talked about a few weeks back. It is the same as their Dashboard, but they give you your own website too that you can share with other people.
Good concept but more limited then some other services already out there.
All these features are already available from http://FoneT.mobi web site which is a mobile web site. This is not a new idea.
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