Lifestyle Management Reloaded: Conclusion

Published Nov 15, 2011 (12 years ago)
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The last modifications of this post were around 12 years ago, some information may be outdated!

Lifestyle Management

So here we are at the end of our quest to find the "one tool" or tools to help with "lifestyle management". I hope this has given you a few ideas on some apps you can use. Maybe it even gave you some ideas for something you've never tried before, aggregating all your social communications into a single place.

The Verdict: LiveGo / Feedly

So after bouncing around for nearly two weeks now between all the various options I've listed, I've come to the best solution for me right now. That is a combination of LiveGo for all my mail / social networking and Feedly for my RSS reading. LiveGo is doing a pretty decent job at aggregating my e-mail and social networking together. There is still a bit I'd like to see changed, but I have yet to hear from the developers on if they are continuing the project or not. Feedly has been a welcome surprise. I've had a small adjustment to their interface over Netvibes, but all in all I've really enjoyed the reading experience, my blogs don't feel quite as cluttered, and it's easy to do a "bulk read" option when I just want to clear it out. I'm getting more familiar with the keyboard commands and I'm sure I'll love things even more.

Trillian: Surprisingly Useful

Another app I've been using even more lately is Trillian, primarily for it's notification features, interestingly enough. Trillian already does great with allowing you access to all your IM features. My wife is on Yahoo messenger for work, a good friend uses Google Talk, and we use Google Apps for our work stuff. I'm connected to all three clients (plus my ICQ and MSN for kicks) using one application and I can do all my basic conversations that way. What's better is that Trillian just released some basic integration with Skype, so I can keep those work contacts in touch as well. I'm still mixed about the social networking integration in Trillian. I'd love to see the Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare feeds mixed, so for now I only glance at it occasionally. I also have my e-mail accounts integrated, so I can easily see (and preview) my incoming messages, which has been a huge help.

What about Google+ ?!

I've been using Google+ since the first few betas leaked out. It's nice, but I haven't seen a lot of migration towards it. To some degree I think there is a higher level of communication, thanks to how circles work, but it is still looking for widespread adoption. The stuff I'd like to post I want to cross post over to Facebook and Twitter as well. So far the only plugin that allows me to do this is SGPlus, but reading my Facebook and Twitter stream is still very primitive through the plugin and buggy. At this point I'm on the fence with Google+ I'd love to see it integrated more into apps, so I have one less tab open, but I'm not ready to simply drop it yet.

...and homegrown?

Yeah, it sounds tasty, and I might have to put some time together to make it happen, but who knows when and where that will occur. Maybe a kickstarter project would get stuff going for that. 8^D

Conclusion

Interestingly enough the technology is ALWAYS changing, and something may come out tomorrow that eliminates all of this. That said, it's nice to have a comfortable ground for handling all of this craziness of e-mail, social networking, news, and more. Hopefully I've given you some ideas to work with, and we'll what next "killer app" comes to the table.