threadsy review: The best personal communication aggregator to date? (We’re giving away invites too!)

Before I dive into threadsy’s details, let’s first cover the basics. threadsy is a web-based communication aggregator. It allows you to aggregate your emails and social networks into one common bucket. The basic idea is that communication is all the same, it doesn’t matter if it’s an email, a Facebook message or a direct message on Twitter. threadsy allows you to communicate using all these different platforms seamlessly. At this point, treadsy supports, Email (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and normal IMAP), Facebook and Twitter. threadsy is still in private beta, but we’re giving away 20 invites!

A few months back I received an invite to threadsy‘s private beta. I was really excited about using it for a few days and then somehow forgot about it and got back into my normal routines. Then yesterday I found out that threadsy added IMAP support and decided to take it for another spin.

Since my last visit, they’ve made a lot of improvement to the details that distinguishes an OK product from being a great product. I was once again impressed by threadsy.

After adding your accounts, threadsy will pull all your inbound communication (emails, Facebook messages/notifications and Twitter Direct Messages/Mentions) into the left column. The layout is similar to Google Reader. If you want to read or reply to a message, simply click on it and it will expand. You can also use the small reply icon and use the ‘quick reply’ feature to reply without expanding the full message. This is particularly useful for social networks as the messages tends to be shorten than emails.

The right column is used for outbound communication. The top-part enables you to send Facebook and Twitter updates. Similarly other applications, a URL shortener is also included (in this case bit.ly). Below this module, status updates from your Facebook and Twitter friend appears. For Facebook-items threadsy enables you to comment and ‘like.’ For Twitter-items you can retweet (RT) and reply (@).

While aggregating messages is a great idea, it’s hard to survive with out Instant Messaging today. The guys over at threadsy realized this too. However, instead of writing their own IM client, they outsourced the task to Meebo by adding Meebo for Sites. Unfortunately the drawback of this is that it doesn’t fully integrate with the interface. Moreover, in order to use the IM module, you need to sign in to Meebo, which is a bit inconvenient. Yet, Meebo for Sites or Meebo Bar is a great IM app. It was probably a wise choice from threadsy to focus their resources on their core product for now.

Another thing worth mentioning is search. Since thready aggregates all this data, their search tool becomes very powerful. With one search box, you can search through both your email accounts and social network messages. With more and more communication taking place on social networks, this search feature is really useful.

The bottom line: threadsy is a great aggregator and an impressive service. It’s probably the best personal communication aggregator I’ve seen. That said, my communication needs are not limited to personal communication. Most my emails are business related. The same is true for my tweets. If all I did was to communicate with friends by email, Facebook and Twitter, threadsy would have been the perfect tool. My business and private life overlaps far too much. For now, I’ll stick with Apple Mail for email, Adium for IM and Tweetdeck for posting Twitter updates.

Invites:

• 10 invites
• Another 10 invites