Consolidating your Social Networking Noise

You love your friends and enjoy your acquaintances, but their Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/MySpace activity is killing your productivity. I saw this article in Life Hacker:

The Sledgehammer: NutshellMail

It might seem counter-intuitive to sign up for another web service to majorly reshape the others, but you have no idea what kind of power NutshellMail can give you. It solves what we'll call the Email Alert Circle, which goes something like this:

• You log into social sites and speed-read all the new stuff, but it's destroying your free time, and your brain! It's just too much. You stop visiting so often, but wish you could still get the most relevant stuff from them. So you switch to...
• Oh, look, email alerts! Now you can get just the direct messages, replies, and relevant friend posts. Two weeks later ...
• You're now avoiding your email inbox and decide it, too, is just too much.

So get a free account at NutshellMail. Authorize it to parse your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and/or LinkedIn accounts, and it takes all those "John Smith commented on your status" and "Lindsay Jones sent you a direct message" emails you really don't need to see Right This Minute and delivers them in a digest whenever and however you want them.

"But my Twitter replies are crucial to my self-est..I mean, it's an of-the-moment service!" you say. Fine—go ahead and schedule your NutshellMail updates to arrive every so many hours, depending on your addiction. You'll still get all the updates for everyone you're following, and you won't even have to hop into Twitter.com/TweetDeck/Tweetie/whatnot to reply, because NutshellMail lets you @ reply via email links.

For those who can be realistic about how connected they need to be, NutshellMail takes the constant back-to-work hurdles of email updates, known as bacn in some circles, and pounds them into one flat page of your kinda-need-to-know.