The interface is split up into two columns: inbound and unbound. The inbound column displays a syndicated feed of all email accounts, Facebook messages, wall posts, Twitter direct messages, and @mentions. You can also single out an email account and filter it by unread or starred messages. Emails can be deleted, starred, or even archived (for Gmail). Any changes made through Threadsy is reflected on the respective email service. For composing mail, Threadsy offers a rich text editor, the ability to send mail from any email account, and include attachments. When choosing a recipient, Threadsy auto-fills contacts from email accounts and even cross checks Facebook for profile pictures. Unfortunately Threadsy is unable to send Facebook messages from within the user interface at the moment, but will still redirect you to Facebook to compose the message. Overall, I was quite impressed by the organization and functionality of the email aggregation.

The second column, unbound, manages social networks. Threadsy only supports the two popular social networks at the moment: Facebook and Twitter. There is one feed that combines both Facebook status updates and tweets, but also has the option of filtering down to only one service. There’s support for multiple Twitter accounts as well. Threadsy allows updating both Facebook and Twitter statuses at once. From within the Threadsy interface you can view/leave comments and ‘like’ Facebook statuses. For Twitter you can retweet, reply, and favorite tweets. Clicking on a contact will display a combined profile page that displays a feed of both Facebook and Twitter updates.

In addition to the in and out bound columns, there is a chat bar at the bottom which uses Meebo. The bar stays out of the way of all other communication, but is convenient enough to access chat accounts at any time. It also supports using a universal status and customizing online/offline per account.

Keeping in mind that this service is still in beta, it still has some bugs. The team at Threadsy has done an incredible job of putting so many services into one functional page. It’s rare to see something useful fall into our radar with so many pointless start ups in the making. In the move towards cloud computing, Threadsy could very well be the future desktop email client. While I was skeptical to try this service at first, I have now begun to use Threadsy to manage all my online communication. While I do still experience occasional hiccups, those will hopefully be resolved with further development. This service has real potential and I look forward to see where the company will take it.

Threadsy is still in private beta, but I’ve got some invites to give away. (You’re welcome!) The first 10 people to click through this link will be able to sign up right away! Enjoy: http://bit.ly/4S4Etx

Links: Threadsy.com

Of course, if you wish to opt-out after signing up, you can do so easily at anytime. Just hit the logout button or delete the Skatter Tech App in your Facebook App settings. We honor Facebook’s privacy settings so your real name and profile photo won’t appear if you have it locked down. Also we haven’t done away with the traditional commenting system. You’ll always be able to manually type in your information and even pick a Gravatar when posting a comment!

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Follow Us and Be a Fan:
Skatter Tech is now officially on both Twitter and Facebook. We’ll be posting updates both sites about newly published content. We’ll also be doing a few giveaways before the end of this year of gadgets that have been reviewed here. So if you’ve followed or become a fan of us, you’ll be notified when it happens!

Comments:
Discussions on articles will now be easier than ever before. The “quote” feature has now been dropped in exchange for a threaded commenting system. Replies to a person’s comment will be displayed directly below the original comment. For now only one level of replies have been enabled, however if found useful more depth will be implemented. User images are now fully powered by Gravatar. If you have setup an account there, your photo will be displayed on any comment you leave on Skatter Tech.

RSS Feed:
Due to certain incompatibility issues readers were facing, all feeds on Skatter Tech are now optimized with Google’s FeedBurner. Our feeds have and will always continue to be full length feeds. We will never force you to have to leave your RSS Client to retrieve the rest of the content, although we do encourage discussion. Current subscribers should be able automatically begin to receive the newly formatted feeds without any action necessary on their part.

Web Compatibility:
All content on Skatter Tech is now 100% XHTML 1.0 Valid. We’re trying to keep up with web standards and requirements. Skatter Tech should work in just about any major browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, or Google Chrome.

Mobile Edition:
If you’ve got an Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry, or any other mobile device that has a web browser you’re now in luck! No special mobile URLs are needed, just visit skattertech.com as you would do on your computer on your mobile device. A mobile friendly version of Skatter Tech should appear in your browser. We’ve got an interface for both touch screen and standard browsers. So what are you waiting for, give it a shot and let us know how it works!

Other Info:
We’re also running on the latest version of WordPress (2.8.3 at the time of publication) and running on Media Temple’s Servers. More upgrades are on their way including resurrecting our forums and integrating social networking authentication. Check back for more updates!

I had been an avid Facebook user for over an year, but I’ve been reconsidering after the launch of Facebook Apps. The days when all Facebook offered was Photos, Groups, Events, Notes, and Posted Items were simple times. Today we’ve got over 450+ photo, 400+ music , 450+ video, 1000+ gaming, and 1000+ sports applications. And that’s nothing, as of now, Facebook is less than 200 short of reaching 10,000 pointless applications! Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of useful apps, but for the most part the majority of these tools are useless. Having to deal with hundreds of application invitations every time I login has become quite painful. For example, why on earth would anyone need a Top Friends list or a Super Wall when Facebook already has a fully functioning friends list and wall? Facebook seriously needs to implement an option to allow users to opt-out or block some of these applications.

The next most horrendous part is how long it’s starting to take to load some people’s profiles and how lengthy they have become. Just to give everyone an glimpse of how bad Facebook can get, take a look at four images provided above. I created temporary Facebook Profile and added the first 20 pages of the most popular Apps. The page was in fact so long that I couldn’t even generate a single screen shot. Fortunately I haven’t run into anyone’s profile that was this bad, but it is definitely going in that direction. Facebook should maybe consider placing a limit on the amount of applications a user can have active at a time. Hopefully the folks over at Facebook will spend time fixing up the mess they made by launching Facebook Applications instead of wasting resources on other projects like Facebook Ads.

Links: Facebook.com | Skatter Tech Fan Page