Email. Twitter. Instant Messaging. Facebook. Those are just four of the most popular ways to communicate online. And actually, the average 23-year-old has 6 different accounts that they check for messages each day. Maintaining and keeping up with that is either basically impossible, or flat-out impossible. That’s where Threadsy comes in.
Launching its large beta today at TechCrunch50 as a free web app, Threadsy wants to take all of your online communication and shove it into a single service. All of the messages directed at you (email and Twitter @replies, for exmaple) will be put into a single stream of message, called the “inbound” column. Meanwhile, all of the activity streams that you simply follow (Twitter, Facebook, etc), will be put into a single activity stream, the “unbound” stream. The result is one service to rule them all.
The great thing about this is that you no longer have to sign into multiple accounts while remembering who is trying to communicate with you. Everyone also has a profile on Threadsy which shows all the social networks you reside on.
While the thought of putting all of your communication in one place is nice, quantity will obviously be an issue. But Threadsy is more than just communication aggregation, it also promises to provide deep context about the people you are communicating with, so you can filter and manage the stream. You can also filter by the type of service (for example, only seeing tweets or Facebook messages).
In terms of monetization, like a lot of other communication platforms, Threadsy will show contextual advertisements. But the service says that unlike something like Gmail, it won’t always show them, and instead will only do so when it could actually help the user.
Threadsy currently looks at over 40 social sites on the web to get this information. CEO Rob Goldman and VP of Engineering Udi Nir demoed the app today at the event.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)
The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire
RS: I think this is great for me. But are there enough people who will care about this? But I want it right now!
RG: That’s a great point, we followed FriendFeed closely, but we’re trying to pull all the information that’s required.
DC: This is the PIMP problem (personal information management). I like that this tackles that aspect of day to day problems.
RH: It’s a good communications platform but Google has tried this before. It’s a tough challenge.
SP: It’s beautifully built, but this is a huge challenge. But this looks very good and clean. I’m not a user of something like this, because this is more for power-users, and I don’t think all inboxes are created equal. A Facebook message is lighter than a regular email, and Twitter even less.
RS: How do you make money off the stream?
RG: We think current webmail misses the mark by focusing on low value ads across all message. We only want to focus on 2, 3, or 4 percent of your messages.
RS: What about hooking up with Tumblr or Posterous for curation?
RG: It’s exciting to see what people do with this.
MA: So FriendFeed is dead to your Robert, is this it?
RS: Maybe.
C: It definitely depends on how it feels when you try it out. I feel like I’m cheating on my MySpace, so I think this is brilliant. How safe is this though? Everyone could get everything if they got into your account.
Video:
Other Coverage:
TechCrunch50: The Better Social Network AppScout.
Threadsy: All Your Communications, All in One Place Technologizer.
The service sounds interesting, but i just have a slight problem with some people who name their companies weird sounding and hard to spell names. “Threadsy”, what kind of a name is that? hard to spell, and has a weird sound when saying it. Go ahead, try saying it out loud…!
The name is awful but the real “deal breaker” is that you need to give to such Social aggregators (Friendbinder and other likes this one) all your credentials !!!
Bye bye security and privacy….
If someone finds a security leak in that app you are scrwed.
Only a client that do the same could make sense for me.
Anyway good job Thred…whatever your name is !
Will OAuth break most of this stuff?
Break? How do you mean?
I was excited about threadsy and signed up only to see “give us your username and password” to sites that have other means (like Facebook and Twitter).
I won’t use it until they get their act together and start using OAuth or FB connect or similar.
Who trusts a spanking new startup with the keys to their complete online life?
“threadsy” … yup not super hard to say. esl?
Yeah, very difficult name, try to say that in a bar/party. Very nice looking and very useful but only for the super user types.
There is now way that they can make money from this. But maybe the the founders are rich from previous endeavors and they don’t need to make money anymore!
I hate these web2.0 names.
Someone oughta create a service that solves that problem somehow (and no, not another humorous web2.0 name generator).
There is a solution to that problem already, and its called money.
All the classy names have already been taken. And startup founders are too cheap to actually pay more than $10 for a domain name.
This is like FriendBinder which is in public beta already at http://friendbinder.com
This website doesn’t have email. Please, refrain from plugging unless it is a clear alternative.
Speaking of which, anyone doing similar sites, or trying similar sites that are better?
yeah…this is good!
I might add, our name is even harder to say while holding your tongue!
One thing to clarify… we’ve built threadsy not just for power users, but for average users of social media that want to lazily see an integrated view of all of their online communications in one place. This would be anyone who uses a major webmail as their primary email and is also on facebook (and quite possibly twitter). The goal is powerful simplicity and communication harmony that’s a fresh new experience.
Invites coming out as soon as we can get them to you, we’re getting SLAMMED with requests. Thank you TC50!
Great busines model –
But Agreed – Threadsy is a very poor brand name
Realtime Station, StreamSearch or RealtimeHub are better selections — IMHO
Poor brand name? You have to still build off a brand. Streamsearch, Realtime Station, I wouldn’t know if these were social media aggregators or music sites.
Branding only helps if the market has enough taxonomy to justify using the words. Music Events: Myspace, Jamvents, etc.
Social Media Aggregation is pretty new. You could name a company GumpJump and it wouldn’t matter in this industry. Too many brands have made it without the name.
To say Threadsy is a poor name, and then bring up Streamsearch ( which from the name, I have no idea what the site is ), makes Threadsy such a better name.
I think they can do better, but its kind of a non-argument.
This looks absolutely fantastic. Sign me up!
I really liked Threadsy.com. I couldn’t see their UI at all from where I was sitting, but it looked like Cotweet expanded to all of the other sites that are important for social media management.
White label version?
I’ve been waiting for a service like this!
I didn’t get the name at first.
then I was like, “duh, a thread.”
(like an e-mail conversation. where you go back and forth)
and then I was like “I get it”.
better than like aloqa, whrrl or some jackass name like that.
there are no url’s open anymore.
Then there is also http://www.inbox2.com. Similair in certain aspects but very different in a lot of others.
[Disclaimer: I am the CTO of Inbox2]
Unfortunatly I didn’t hear the judges ask a couple of questions that we have been hearing a lot from users and I guess threadsy also has to deal with also.
1. The biggest problem with a service such as this is to get people to switch over. When people are used to something such as GMail/Outlook/whatever its very, very hard to get them to switch over. It has to be at least 10 times as good. Whats the USP there?
2. Second biggest problem is privacy. You are asking people to put their passwords and data at your disposal. Might look simple but a lot of people simply won’t try the service because of this reason. A lot of others will though and when you reach a certain scale this does not matter anymore.
3. Scaling. You guys are building basically a fetcher product. Scaling fetchers is hard because you have to poll frequently just to see if there is new data. Unfortunatly this is just how things work. But it makes building a frontend for other inboxes a particularly hard problem to solve (maybe not something a judge should ask, but still…)
Regarding the monetization issue. We have also been struggling with this for a while now, very tough nut to crack due to the availability of inventory. Its great that you want to target the action compared to the content (works for google) but its hard to find any supplier that can basically provide the ads realtime as you search. Google (AFAIK) certainly doesn’t do this. You’d have to start your own ad sales force and I guess thats not something you would want to do at this point in your startup.
My honest advice: go for the premium route. People have certain problems, if your problem solves a couple of those then people might be willing to pay for it.
Good luck,
Waseem
Hmm, I requested an invite code to try inbox2 awhile back and didn’t receive one.
Should I resubmit the request ?
We’re sending out around 100 invites a week while we scale up our backend in preparation for the *hint* facebook and iphone versions *hint*
send me an email at waseem at inbox2.com and i’ll get you an invite before that
“the average 23-year-old has 6 different accounts that they check for messages each day”
Source?
2nd that.
i love threadsy, who cares about the name. It makes my day much easier. I use is twice a day and get all my messages and answer them in a timely way
Sounds good but I use Trillian Astra.
Have: Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, 2 x Pop email accounts, Skype, AIM and ICQ all in one place, in one really cool desktop app.
Not sure why this is being over looked by Techcrunch, and no I don’t have anything to do with Trillian.
https://www.trillian.im/
This is a direction I think friendfeed needs to go.
It’s great that I can put all my content on one site, but too bad I don’t use it because no one else I know uses it. So when I go to the site and go to “friends”, i see only my content. Whee.
Looks like an interesting product, but I think it will be a challenge to make this appealing to average users.
Although if you have a lot of time to waste, this looks like an app for you!
Nice idea but unfortunately Google Wave & Wave-based complementors will eat this products market
Most of these apps do use the same technical aspects, but I have learned its all about the design and function. How well can I read my email?
How easy is it to disseminate information? Oodle Pro has a new concept in expanding classifieds listings to multiple sites. Can threadsy push this function easy?
Security is a huge issue, but other companies are trying to aggregate these things together, hopefully someone can test the security for these websites and maybe review their weaknesses.