As social interactions and contact information get distributed across different services like Facebook and Twitter, it’s harder for you to keep track of all your contacts and what’s happening with them. Yesterday, Web Worker Daily’s Samuel Dean reviewed Fuser, a universal inbox that lets you get email from all your accounts and messages from your social networks in one place. That addresses part of the problem. But it doesn’t make it easy for you to update all those social networks or keep track of what other people are doing on them.
If you’re a Gmail user, you probably already know you can consolidate other email accounts into it, with Mail Fetcher or simply by having messages forwarded to your Gmail and adding “from” email addresses on the Settings page. Steve Rubel goes a step beyond that and turns Gmail (or any email client) into a social network hub — an outboard social brain.
Using mail gateways like Twittermail and an email to SMS gateway, Rubel can post status updates to his social networks and send messages to his friends there. He also imports status update feeds from selected friends so he can keep up to date on them without having to leave email.
Rubel says, “These are just a handful of tips and this concept is evolving but even before someone builds the big social graph in the sky, I am just getting along fine using Gmail, thanks to a bit of hackery.”
Gmail already worked reasonably well for tracking contact information and interactions over time, especially given its integration of GTalk and automatic creation of contact entries. But now that we’re branching out onto other platforms, maybe email can be the ultimate social environment, with capabilities far beyond email, including instant messaging (as GTalk provides), presence, Twitter-like status updates, and more.
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