As I mentioned in my earlier, I'm on a hunt to find the "one tool" or tools to help my "lifestyle management" of being able to check e-mail, facebook, twitter, and more without having tons of applications or browser windows open. The next tool I found seems to be the most promising so far: LiveGo.
LiveGo is still in beta, and says on their website "Collect, Organize, Simplify, Share". If you take a peek at their demo page, it looks something like this:
This is probably the closest thing to the Threadsy interface I've seen to date. What is really nice is how the Twitter and Facebook feeds are merged together below your mail Inbox. You can even reply or like/share directly within the feed. Images that are attached to a post can be viewed full sized (or at least larger) by simply hovering the mouse over the image. If you do need to get more in depth social interaction, you can click on the appropriate option on the sidebar and dig in. This feature provides something that Threadsy didn't have, and I like how I can dig into my Facebook or Twitter stream on occasion. I can also view just my Hotmail/Gmail as I please. This merge/separation option is VERY helpful.
LiveGo also features integration with the various instant messenger clients. As part of logging in to your Hotmail account, you're also logged in to your MSN chat client, so you can chat with your friends without launching another application. This applies to GMail, Facebook, and Yahoo messenger as well. The chat client is simple, but gives you new windows for each person you're chatting with and the option to "minimize" them to a small box within the web page to focus on other things.
There are a few problems surrounding LiveGo that still makes me a smidge hesitant about it. While I have no qualms about using beta software these days, the LiveGo blog hasn't been updated in about a year. LiveGo also features an iPhone app on their home page, and I wonder if they abandoned the web product in favor of the mobile one. From what I can see the mobile app doesn't support mail, so that option is currently out for me. My concern is that the lack of feedback on their blog, as well as anywhere else, might mean they've abandoned things and the bugs won't get fixed. There are bugs there too. I can't seem to remove Facebook messages in my Inbox and the site access seems glitchy. Some days I can get on the site and some days I can't. I also think that some of my e-mail read/unread/delete status aren't propagating back to the server, since I'll log into Hotmail and see everything that was deleted in LiveGo. This could be due to Hotmail access though (it still goes over POP by default) and I can live with that for now.
The instant messenger feature seems to be an "all or nothing" type factor. I don't do a whole lot of IM these days, but I still prefer Trillian for all of my instant messaging needs. If I choose to "sign out of messengers" within LiveGo, I run into problems with my Hotmail, or even my chat client for Yahoo, since both are pretty strict about being logged in to a single location. So my solution is typically to log into LiveGo, then start up Trillian. LiveGo will notify me about MSN and Y! logging on at a different location/client, but everything continues as normal.
Some of the layout could change a little as well in my opinion. The chat windows aren't able to "escape" their parent frame, so if you have an ongoing conversation, you'll have to minimize it to read your incoming mail. The layout also chose to have your mail and social network stream all in one scrollable window. So if you scroll to check your social news, you'll lose seeing your e-mail until your scroll back up. This is a little awkward at times for me, but nothing critical.
The more I dig into LiveGo, the more I'm excited, and the more I hope that I don't get disappointed by a drop in support or a sudden loss in service. LiveGo has all the Threadsy features, plus a few more, and I'm still exploring it, which is a good sign.