Tech For Free!

I often hear from my colleagues, family, and friends that they “don’t have time” to manage their social networking accounts. As a proponent of social media & networking, I dislike hearing this, but the reality is we are all short on time. That said, what tools are available to us that can streamline and automate our lives so that we can remain on top of what’s happening within our own social networks? Enter Socialite.

Socialite is a free desktop application (mac only) that allows you to view and manage your Facebook, Flickr, Digg, and Twitter account(s) through a single window or view, which is commonly know as your “lifestream.” So instead of visiting multiple sites, you open up Socialite and viola! you see what’s happening with all of your social networks. It’s clean minimalist interface makes it simple to manage. For example, you can choose to see what’s happening with all of your accounts as one giant stream of information by clicking “unread”, or you can choose to only read postings from one account by clicking on the account name.

Socialite has maintained the basic features of each application (it even includes profile photos). For example, Socialite allows me to “like” and comment on Facebook postings. Additionally I can post status updates and even add photos. A feature I thought was particularly nice was that I could “tweet” a Facebook posting with 2 clicks of the mouse and no typing!

Another nice feature of Socialite is that it allows you pull in multiple RSS feeds. So instead of visiting multiple websites, you can set Socialite to display your favorite RSS enabled website (indicated by the orange symbol on the right) or blog.

I think it’s also worth noting that if you maintain multiple accounts with any of the services (it’s quite common for people to have multiple Twitter accounts) that you can display them all within Socialite. For example, I initially setup my Socialite account to display 3 Twitter accounts, 1 Facebook account, several blog feeds, and 3 Flickr accounts.

Socialite offers a free version, and for today only (7/15/10),  MacHeist is offering it’s ad free version ($30 value) for free. The free version has one ad displayed in the lower left corner, and has the feel of an album cover being displayed within iTunes. I didn’t find it to be an intrusion at all. To get the ad free version you have make a posting on your Facebook page that promotes MacHeist’s newest application, Calcbot.