NutshellMail, a way to restore order in your social life
by Celine Roque
The social networking landscape is evolving fast. Myspace used to be “IT” a few years ago, but now Facebook is taking over, and don’t forget LinkedIn if you’re out to do professional networking. Then there’s the surging popularity of Twitter (and God knows what’s next). It can be difficult to choose just one of them as your home on the web. Often, you sign up where your friends already are, and usually they’re scattered among these sites. If you sign up for everything, it can be tough to keep up.
Nutshellmail is a web tool that attempts to put some sanity back into your life. Instead of logging on to these sites one by one to check if there’s anything new, or sifting through a ton of email notifications on your inbox, Nutshellmail gathers all the updates for you. Friend requests, status updates, tweets, and more are summarized, then sent in one neat little email. No more cluttered inbox. This alone can save you a lot of precious time.
The great thing about it is that these summaries are interactive. For example, you can retweet, update your status, and reply to comments all without leaving your email client. You can also customize when you want to receive these updates by choosing particular days and hours. I’ve scheduled mine to be sent twice daily, once in the morning and another in the late afternoon.
If you have multiple email accounts, you can configure Nutshellmail to include new message summaries for these secondary emails. This way, your primary email serves as your central console, from which you have a bird’s eye view of all messages coming in. Only the subject lines and senders will be included in the Nutshellmail update. However, clicking on a “Get” link will provide the means to push an email of interest to your primary account. Within seconds, you can read it and take appropriate action from there.
You can open an account on Nutshellmail for free, and the whole process couldn’t be simpler. After using it for a little while, I’m sure it’s going to be part of my routine from now on (until something better comes along). It’s an excellent idea. The only thing that I wish was different is the number of compatible social networks. Right now, it only supports the Big Four (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter), but there are many other notable players with their own strong regional user base. Let’s hope Nutshellmail expands their menu soon.
Thought...
