For better or worse, personal email is dying. Two decades ago, email was the future--and now it’s beginning to feel like the past. Between Twitter, Facebook, and other sharing tools, my email inbox has become a repository for sales pitches, a few residual mailing lists I can’t seem to get off, Facebook alerts, and spam. Almost all of the personal emails I used to exchange with friends and family have moved onto social networks.
Keep tabs on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and more. But say goodbye to being a productive citizen.
But keeping up with several different sites every day gets taxing. RealMac’s Socialite (formerly EventBox) aims to consolidate everything into a single native Mac app. And it largely succeeds, although seeing everything across all your social media outlets at once can also feel overwhelming.
Socialite presents your social info in a familiar iTunes-style interface. Your accounts (currently supported: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and RSS feeds) are listed on the left, while the right side presents content from your currently selected account. A text field at the bottom lets you post messages to your various services, and a live character count shows how much space you have left.
Using Socialite with Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader, I was able to consolidate my most often-checked networks and configure alerts to highlight new posts. As a Twitter client, Socialite excels, offering support for Mentions, Direct Messages, and newer Twitter features like Lists and Retweets. It’s also a capable Facebook reader, allowing you to view and post Status messages and photos. We liked being able to turn friends’ photos on or off (frankly, we’re more interested in Status updates than pictures of cats, lunches, and adorable babies), but we would have liked to see Socialite offer our friends’ posted links as well. Still, it was nice to be able to view and comment on a stream of Statuses without having to hear about anybody’s farm or mafia. Strangely, the controls to view and add comments only appear once someone has already left a comment on a particular update.
For power users, Socialite offers the Quick Send window, which you can use with a configurable hotkey to send an update to one of your services no matter what you’re doing on your Mac. And if you can’t bear to tear your eyes away from what everyone else is doing, a compact heads-up display is an alternative to the main Socialite window.
We liked having all our social media in one place, but Socialite could do a better job of integrating our various accounts. And we hope its few strange quirks get cleaned up in future versions.
Socialite
COMPANY: RealMac Software
CONTACT: www.realmacsoftware.com
PRICE: $20
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.5 or later
Consolidates all your feeds. Supports new features like Twitter lists and retweets. Supports multiple accounts on each service. Quick Send window is great for dashing off updates on the fly.
Having access to every social network simultaneously can become overwhelming. No support for posting across multiple accounts. Documentation is weak. A few annoying bugs.
