MyLife wants to streamline your online social life
While the new service provides an all-in-one social media and e-mail organizer, the feeds may just be too much for a person to handle all at once.
MyLife, a people-finding Web service, hopes to expand its presence in the social media world by offering a new dashboard to organize your feeds and e-mail accounts.
The dashboard, which went live today, takes a user's Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and combines them with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL accounts.
CEO Jeff Tinsley said people often start their days by accessing their social media, so MyLife wants to simplify the process by putting them all on one dashboard.
"Consumers are just overwhelmed," he said. "They're using many different services and they're jumping around to places and they don't want to miss anything."
The company is so confident people will use the dashboard that it's rolling out a $25 million TV ad campaign this year to promote it.
I am always looking to streamline my different feeds, especially since I have old e-mail addresses and I can barely remember my passwords. When I signed into for MyLife, I quickly realized what an overload of information I look at all the time. Putting it in once place was almost too overwhelming for me (I also had to keep reconnecting to my Facebook account, but that may be opening day bugs).
The services shows any messages that are directed at you specifically on a stream in the left-hand side. This includes direct messages and mentions on Twitter (and I assume Facebook when it is connected properly), and e-mails.
On the right hand side is all your social media feeds from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You are also supposed to be able share updates or links directly from the dashboard, but while I could do it for Twitter, the Facebook post failed. And there was no icon for posting to LinkedIn. Additionally, I couldn't see the comments on any of posts, which I found limiting.
In concept, this could be a great product. I like seeing my e-mails and mentions in one place and I also liked that everything is marked with tiny icons so you know the source of each message. But, there are some bugs that needs to be worked out.
I'm not sure I'll keep using it -- I feel like the dashboard isn't quite there yet. Or, maybe I'm just not ready to see what a social network glutton I really am. If you try it out, let me know what you think.