LiveGO: One app for IM, Facebook, Twitter and Google+

Back in 2009, I asked for one social network to rule them all because I was tired of following friends, status updates and location check-ins on multiple platforms. That hasn’t happened, and now I have at least a half-dozen apps on my smartphone to navigate the crazy social currents. But there is some smart software that can, at the very least, mildly aggregate social networking activity. LiveGO is one of the newest such apps for iOS, and I took it for a brief spin on my iPod touch this morning.

LiveGO is essentially one app that houses both instant messenger accounts as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ activity. The software actually started up in 2006 as a web-based IM client called MessengerFX, and the web roots show through in the app. From a technical standpoint, the software is mainly an IM client with wrappers for the social network services, so you won’t see redesigned clients for Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Instead, LiveGO integrates the standard web interfaces for each.

As a result, it offers a single app where you can quickly switch between social networks with the press of a button. Sure, you could run each app individually in iOS and multitask between them, but I find it much faster to just tap a button in LiveGO to move back and forth between networks. And the software is a full-featured IM client that supports MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and GTalk. LiveGO also supports IM notifications, but only for three hours after inactivity or closure of the application.

Again, LiveGO is more of an aggregator and doesn’t add new functionality to social network management, but it’s free and might be a faster way to stay in tune with friends on different networks.