Joinbox - A Slick Dashboard That Brings Social, Email, And News In To One Stream [Shutdown]

UPDATE: Joinbox announced on December 17, 2012 that they have decided to discontinue the service (copy of message displayed on homepage).

Joinbox is on a mission to create a better web experience for the everyday user. They hope to merge your social activities, email, and news together to form one cohesive consumer website that does it all. This tantalizing video from last year got everyone excited for a one stream solution! One year later, a true product demo has been released along with early access.


Did that get you excited? That sure is an elegant, simple, and fluid dashboard. The founding thought of the service is to bring everything to your personal internet mailbox. Do you travel around the world picking up magazines, newspapers, and letters or are they mailed to your home? Joinbox wants to eliminate the need for you to be opening and monitoring numerous tabs and visiting countless websites every day just to stay on top of your networks and the news. It should also be just as easy to check up on your network when you are traveling or on a friend's computer.

Five founders started this mission in 2010 after they could not find an easy way to consolidate all the incoming information they were looking at while researching to possibly start a freshly baked croissant delivery service. Since then they said goodbye to the croissant world and hello to Joinbox. It has been a long. hard, and educational journey to build in Node.js and to get to where they are today after starting over from scratch this past summer. This information consumption problem is a complex one and can't be solved overnight. After two months of alpha testing with about a hundred users they are ready for a larger private beta. We have invites!

Let's take a look at what Joinbox Double Rainbow can do. Below we see the settings page where everything is setup and deleted.

• Social Networks - Connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts via OAuth. It will allow more than one Twitter connection, but no Facebook pages. LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr integration is in the works.
• Email - Bring in emails from one or more services by adding your email address and password.
• News - Search for news and follow sources. Unfortunately this does not support you to directly follow an RSS feed or import a set of subscriptions via OPML.

On the main page you are shown the total unread/unseen items with a breakdown for each stream. You may drill down using the left navigation panel to view everything, only social networks, all emails, just news, or individual accounts within each section. When you click on an item in the middle stream it opens to the right. When available, content is included in the displayed item (photos, videos, RSS stories, Twitter conversation, etc). Tweets do not automatically pull in the content from included links. It would be nice for them to do that like Parrotfish can on Twitter.

When composing a new message you are able to send it to by email, Twitter, or Facebook.

Overall the design is fast and intuitive. If your browser window is smaller it will auto expand the area on mouseover and, as seen above, grey other sections out that are not in use. The only real issue I had was upon login, sometimes I had to refresh to get my feed to come up the first time. Retweeting, replying, favoriting, liking, and commenting all work as expected. I use Gmail and replying broke the "conversation" which I don't like. For a just out of alpha release it is solid and looks very promising. I will certainly be using and testing it, but need to see more features and enhancements before exclusively relying on it.

The five founders that make up the Joinbox team are Konrad Mazanowski (CEO), Michael van der Weg (CTO), Felix Steiner (VP of development), Fabian Jordi (development), and Tobias Kneubühler (development). In the future they want to add more services, chat, enhance email functionality, and tackle news aggregation. With that they hope to eliminate double inputs (you don't need to see the same story on three different channels) and to find what is really important to you. They admittedly have a lot of work a head of them. You can follow Joinbox on Twitter, Facebook, and their blog.

Who wants to use Joinbox? Retweet the below Tweet, or email me, and tomorrow I will randomly pick ten people from those that did to give access to. Be sure to follow me on Twitter so I can direct message you.

Joinbox - A Slick Dashboard That Brings Social, Email, And News In To One Stream - goo.gl/dxLfO
— Dain Binder (@dbin78) February 28, 2012

Know About It Breaks Through The Noise

Know About It aims to help you see the content that is most important to you across your networks and make it easier to stay on top of the topics you care about. Services like Know About It, Summify, and Percolate are working hard to answer the content overload problem. Knowabout.it brings recommendations to the next level with intuitive analysis of multiple data sources to truly show what you want to see, not just aggregated stories that were shared the most.

It starts off by scanning all the links in your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Buzz streams. Then brings in your RSS feeds (including Google Reader's), Twitter Lists, LinkedIn data, and people you follow on Disqus. Even if you don't have time to read it's recommendations now you can save some for later using the seamless integration with Read it Later and Instapaper. The system learns even more about you when you like or dislike individual items using the web interface.

A daily summary email is sent according to your specifications as well as automatic alerts based on sources or content. Using the filters on the website you can drill down in to the type of media (photo, video), recommendations inside and out of your network, or potentially missed items that come from low volume sources that tend to get lost in the noise.

Give it a try today and let me know what you think. Once you signup and add your sources be sure to give it about an hour to work through your content and learn about you.

Google News Badges

Google brings badges to Google News for you to collect and show your friends based on what news articles you click on. The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

A few tips to earn badges:

• Badges will level up faster if you read a few relevant articles every day, rather than trying to read everything at once.
• You can click on a badge to see articles that will help the badge reach its next level.
• If you read a few articles a day about your favorite topics, you should earn your first badge in about a week.

How To Follow News And Stories Online Without The Overload

With everything I read being online I have had to become very efficient in the way I manage and interact with news and articles. When you replace your local TV news, the national news, magazines, newspapers, trade publications and everything else with the digital world you can quickly become buried in a mountain of unread stories. The number of applications and website claiming to organize all this can add to your anxiety. News is generated from hundreds of sources around the web and going to each one is impossible.

What can you do? The most important things are organization and non-duplication. You do not need to see the same story in three different locations just because the source publishes to all of them. If you follow my blog you should pick the one source that works for you; not all five.

Lets run through the primary tools I use to consume the news:

1) Twitter - This should be used for your breaking news and important resources that are time sensitive. It is best to keep the number of accounts your follow to under 100. Anymore than that you will be missing news because you can not keep up. Don't forget; just because you are not following them on here does not mean you can not follow them somewhere else. If you are following over 100, try to find some of your less urgent sources and track them another way.

2) RSS Feed Reader) - RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and the feed is usually designated by an icon like this . I have found it to be the number one way to read and organize my information intake. You are able to follow major news websites, blogs, and pretty much any website that posts stories and updates. You can even follow news aggregators like Google News so that you do not have to go to the site directly. Just look for the RSS icon at the bottom of the page you are on to find the feed (this is the one for Top Stories). Keep in mind not to subscribe to any sources you already follow on Twitter. Within any reader you can organize your feeds and I suggest you do so to group subjects and interests. Don't be afraid of clicking the "mark all as read" button; if you have over 500 items to read click the button to get a fresh start. The sooner you realize that you can not read everything the happier and less stressed you will be.

3) Facebook - My news here is my friends and family only. If I like pages I hide them from my news feed to avoid information overload as things I like I already read on Twitter or in Google Reader. If you like getting your news here that is fine of course, but don't also follow it on Twitter or subscribe by RSS. If I find a compelling post or article I want to comment on from another source I can go to that page on Facebook to find the story.

4) Email - It can't be beat for daily digest emails and is an excellent way to control what information you get. You can even have some websites email you the stories instead of subscribing via RSS. Depending on the sources email frequency you can use email for urgent or low priority news like opinion articles. One thing I like to do is to get an email every eight hours from Summify. Summify scans my Twitter, RSS, and Facebook accounts to find the most important stories and is a easy way for me to ensure I do not miss important stories.

5) Buzz - I check it once or twice a day for the comments. The Buzz crowd is a insightful and thorough group of commenters. Most of the stories I would have already seen because 99% of the post are imports from Twitter and blog RSS feeds.

Happy reading! Do you consume news and information in a different way? Let everyone know what works for you in the comments section below. I am always trying new applications, extensions, and websites that claim to be able to organize the information better, but I have not been able to find one that improves on what I do above. Have you?

Google's New News Follow Button

Just spotted a new button on Google News. Once you search for a topic you can then press the "Follow...news" button to let it easily be added to your personalized news page.