December 08, 2008

I want an all-in-one communicator!

Here's a list of ways in which I currently communicate with others:

  • corporate e-mailing through outlook
  • corporate e-mailing through a web client
  • private e-mailing using my ISP provider's services
  • mixed private & professional e-mailing using GMail
  • chatting using mainly GTalk
  • group chats through chatterous (which isn't really useful for large groups)
  • publishing blog items on an internal blog (rarely)
  • publishing blog items on a public corporate blog (about once a week)
  • publishing blog items on my public personal blog (which you are reading right now)
  • leaving comments on blog posts
  • posting updates & replying to updates from friends on Twitter
  • sending direct messages on Twitter
  • phone calls over VoIP using my ISP provider's services (fairly frequently)
  • phone calls over VoIP using Skype (very rarely)
  • phone calls using a land line
  • phone calls using a cell phone
  • sending short messages using my cell phone (very rarely)
  • sharing documents on Google Documents
I could probably find a few more if I took more time, but I think this already suffices to make my point. To support all this communication I need various tools:
  • an e-mail client
  • a web browser
  • a Twitter interface (a web client or desktop client)
  • RSS reader
  • a cell phone
  • a chat client
  • a VoIP capable phone
I probably use a web browser for most of my communications, but I use various online applications for this, which in my opinion adds to the list of tools I need:
  • the URL of the admin interface of my personal blog
  • the URL of the admin interface of the corporate blog
  • the URL of Twitter
  • the URLs of the various webmail interfaces I use
  • ...
In spite of the title of this post, I am not looking for an all-in-one tool for ALL my communications, but a mashup of some sorts would be really usefull.

I am thinking of a single tool that provides me with the following services:
  • notify me when someone writes about a topic that interests me
  • notify me about comments I receive on a blog post (for all blogs I publish to)
  • notify me about updates to documents I share with others
  • notify me about e-mails that really interest me (for example because of their contents and because they are sent to me by people in my network)
  • notify me about my friend's whereabouts and activities (twitter)
  • allow me to contact people using various methods depending on my relationship with these people (e.g. twitter reply, leaving a comment, send a direct e-mail, chat, call, ...)
Wouldn't it be great to have all that combined in a single, easy to use tool? If it exists, please tell me where it is. Otherwise I am calling out to the open source community to go create one.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

One of my twitter buddies (thanks @hjvanderklis) pointed me to Digsby, which indeed does many of the things I ask for. I am giving it a try!