I don't know how you all feel about this - but apart from being the easiest place to send all my mail to - Gmail doesn’t cut it for me. This is going to sound grouchy - but I really don't like Gmail’s filtering capabilities, I don't like the way it aggregates messages into discussions, I don't much care for its layout. It's too rigid. The discussion aggregation isn't fluid - if I forwarded emails to 15 different people, it just groups their replies into that discussion, instead of starting new ones. I have one thread where I have 15 different conversations, each with important individual dates and meeting times, all grouped together into a 100 email thread!
I'm a huge fan of aggregation services (as I've mentioned before...), and today I found a few new ones of note
Feebly.com - Fantastic aggregator of blogs, RSS feeds, and other information into one platform. Feebly doesn’t aggregate EVERYTHING on the web for you, but it does do news and blog information quite well. I love the layout, the presentation, and the navigability of the page.
LifeIO – The self proclaimed “swiss army knife” of information – I like that branding and I think they do it effectively. Again , if you want to be the place where I point all of my information sources to, you have to make my life easier. It has to be easy for me to setup the account and setup the linkages, and it has to be easy for me to then find the information on the site. LifeIO does this remarkably well. The key to this service is that they don’t focus on just one aggregation – they try to do it all – let’s see if they succeed at doing everything well….so far so good…
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Gist.com - The last service I’ve been playing around with recently is Gist. Gist.com has been in beta forever, and there are some pretty smart people behind it, but I just don’t quite get what I’m supposed to use it for. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, it’d be useful for me to see what types of news were being published about the people I am most frequently in contact with….but how useful? I currently only have one friend of all the people I’ve emailed or friended on facebook that has relevant news on them (Congratulations Casey), and I’m in close enough contact with her that I don’t need this service to aggregate news on her for me. Furthermore…the layout is too clustered….I go to gist and feel overwhelmed…so much so that it’s easier for me to simply go to Google every time I’m curious to see what the press is publishing on my friends and network.
