Messaging aggregator Fuser is growing up

23.10.2008
I met with the makers of Fuser about a year ago, and was, admittedly by their product. Fuser had just come out with its beta product, which is a central mail and messaging inbox into which mail from all your various email inboxes (MySpace, Facebook, Gmail, etc.) could flow. At the time I wasn't impressed with the narrow scope of the product -- not enough to use it.

I met with the Fuser folks again Wednesday. They have made some impressive changes to their product, and have some pretty cool ideas for the future too.

First off, the number of email account types you can aggregate is much higher now. Fuser can grab mail from 94 percent of all email clients out there, including all the major ones. It also continues to grab mail from the two major social networking sites--Facebook and MySpace.

The mailbox is simple and seems to follow the recognizable Microsoft Express template. One the left-hand pane you can see all of your mailboxes from Yahoo Mail to Facebook. You can choose to see mail from all of those accounts, or just one or two, in the main, or central, pane of the app.

Fuser has also added to the mix, but Fuser wisely does not handle "tweets" in the same way it does email. You can open up another left-hand pane to view a constant feed of tweets from any Twitterers you happen to be following.

As we know, is moving toward the sort of real-time, always-on messaging that Twitter has made so popular. Fuser, although it doesn't yet, is looking at plans to integrate real-time updates from your friends on Facebook too--like status changes, alerts, pokes, Zombie Bites, whatever. These might be displayed the way Twitter tweets are displayed, perhaps under a different tab.