Now we have Alternion to add to the mix and it’s definitely not your average aggregation tool. It’s a “free Web service that enables you to combine and manage your social accounts, content feeds, email and direct messages, and stay in touch with your contacts from other services.” It’s currently in private beta, so you will need an invite in order to use it. The service offers a lot of great features and I definitively won’t be able to cover them all, but you can check out the about page for more information.
Connect Your Accounts
The most important step, of course, is connecting all of your social media accounts. Alternion supports an impressive amount of 220+ services. The only downside to this is that you can (currently) only add 20 accounts; so choose wisely. The list seems almost endless. For each services that you add, you can specify who can see your updates; you can choose everyone, subscribers, or just you. You can also choose whether or not to show a link on your profile for that service.
You can also add multiple accounts for each service. Once you enter your username (or grant permission) and the service has been added, Alternion will show a (1) next to it so that you know that you’ve already added an account for that service. So it’s very easy to keep up with which ones you’ve added and how many accounts you have for each.
Settings
Alternion gives you total control over your privacy and lets you decide which of your activities are public. Under privacy you can control who can see your interests & hobbies, education & career, personal details, contact information and activities. Then under activities, you can get into more specifics and choose which activities are published to your Alternion activity feed.
Manage Your Email
Alternion doesn’t just stop with social media sites, it also allows you to connect and manage any IMAP or POP enabled email account. Your can then view your email from the messages tab. All sources can be viewed at once or individually by email account. The functions here are just about like your regular email. You can reply, forward, delete, mark as read/unread, and add/remove stars. If you’ve created labels/folders in your email accounts, you can even view all of those from within Alternion. The only thing that seems to be missing here is the ability to mark messages as spam.
Keep Up With Contacts
Alternion serves as a great address book with the ability to view contacts from sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. You can view all together or separately by service. If you have a lot of contacts, it’s very easy to find them using the search bar. Clicking on a contact will give you a glimpse of their profile on that site. For instance, with a Facebook contact you can view their updates, photos, videos, links and places all from with the contacts section.
Your Profile
Your Alternion profile gives you a look at all of your updates from each source you’ve added (together or separated by source) as well as your photos, videos, who you’re following and you’re followers. Your updates can also be sorted by type, which is great if you’re looking for something specific that you posted. You can even update your status on Alternion, Facebook and/or Twitter from here. A nice touch is the ability to customize the theme of your profile manually or by using a premade theme.
You can of course view updates from your contacts on the home page. Plus, there are many other features that I haven’t even mentioned.
