A new beta product called Fuser (www.fuser.com) might save you some time and login hassles when you're reading your e-mail. If you're like me you've collected several email and social networking accounts over time, and it takes a little work to log into all of them and collect the mail.
I logged in to Fuser, created a username and password, and told it the usernames and passwords to my Gmail, MySpace and Facebook accounts. Fuser then went out to each service and collected all my unread emails, and combined them all in one inbox at Fuser.com. The service successfully collected my email from all three accounts, and didn't miss any.
And that's pretty much what Fuser does. Instead of logging into Gmail, MySpace, and Facebook (the password for which I can never remember!), all I had to do was log in once to Fuser. Like many good ideas, Fuser's is very simple; that's why I decided to meet with the company and try out their product.
I did notice a couple of quirks: When I opened a longish Gmail message from the Fuser Inbox, no scroll bar appeared at the side of the window with which to navigate down. Also, I got a lot of MySpace "bulletins" mixed in with my mail results, and it wasn't immediately clear how to dispense with those. Fuser president Jeff Herman showed me how and it was pretty easy, but still . . .
The only other issue concerns Fuser's reach--the number of sites it can grab e-mail from. Right now Facebook and MySpace are the only social networking sites it reaches; the service still can't get my LinkedIn messages. Herman says that's probably coming soon. Fuser already connects with a list of thirty or so e-mail providers, including Comcast, AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo, and Herman says it will soon add EarthLink.
So these issues are not deal-breakers for me, so I will keep my Fuser account active and live with it for a few days to see if it really makes life easier for me--it might.
Right now Fuser is simply trying to build a userbase. Herman says its users number "in the thousands" today. Herman says the company of 26 employees is also holding focus groups and trying to work out bugs and design flaws in Fuser's user interface.
A little background. Fuser is the brainchild of Jared Polis, a serial entrepreneur from Denver, and was built with the help of some University of Denver faculty and students last spring. Thus far, Polis has funded the operation entirely, and the company is also running Google ads at its site. Fuser went into open (anyone can sign up) beta last week and expects to leave beta and launch around October 29.