The world of social media is generally hectic and always evolving faster than most people are capable of keeping up with. Twitter alone can be a challenge to manage, let along Facebook, LinkedIn or other networking sites. Most people use multiple social media networks, which means piles of emails, notifications or other distractions that clog up your productivity machine.

NutshellMail helps you get a grasp on your social media networks and the heaps of information that comes along with them. You’ll be able to get your productivity back to the well oiled and smoothly running machine it used to be (or should’ve been).

Overview

Essentially, NutshellMail gathers all the notifications and new information from your social networking sites and sends you one interactive email, enabling you to comment, reply, update your status, etc. directly from your email.

NutshellMail Home

Business Limitations

One really great advantage NutshellMail presents to those working in companies that don’t allow social networking website browsing, is you’ll be able to get all your updates and information as well as interact with most of it from your email. A great way to stick it to “the man”?

Social Media Networks

Currently, it looks like NutshellMail only supports Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and LinkedIn. While those are the major networks, there are many others out there that I’m sure people would like to see added.

Sign Up

Sign up is pretty straight forward; enter your email and desired password then connect to your online services such as Facebook, Twitter or Gmail.

NutshellMail Sign Up

Once your registration is complete, you’ll have to confirm your account and complete your registration via email. I’m not a fan of this as I prefer web apps that take you straight to your account without requiring account confirmation first, but it’s not that much of an annoyance.

Using and Customizing NutshellMail

Once your account has been activated and registration is complete, you’re able to customize your account settings. I’ve added my two primary social media networks, Twitter and Facebook (during sign up).

Customize Account

Interface

NutshellMail’s interface is relatively basic and straight forward, which is fine considering you’ll do the large majority of your interaction with the service via email. When adding new networks or email accounts, the work is enhanced with JavaScript so you’re not constantly loading new pages. I really love web apps that integrate this kind of functionality as it shows they’ve taken the time to integrate some of today’s powerful web technology into their app.

Using NutshellMail

Once you’ve added your social networks and/or email accounts, you’ll want to customize email update delivery times. I’ve set several update delivery times through the day, spaced between one and three hours apart.

Customize Update Delivery Times

These update times should be often enough that I can stay up to date on things but not so often that I’m constantly distracted and getting sidetracked from my work.

While the delivery times here are fine, the interface could be much better designed. Why not use basic rows where the desired update time can be selected (down to a 15 minute option) with a plus button to add more rows (update times)? This is one minor area that could use a few improvements.

If you’ve already received an update but you’d like one right now, you can click the Update button within a selected timeframe. The timeframe options are really limited though, especially for those who have information pouring in via Twitter or Facebook on the hour. You may not want an update from the last full 24 hours, but instead the last XX hours.

Email Update Interface

The email update interface is pretty clean, organized and simple but it doesn’t really satisfy the designer in me. I know email design is rather limited, but I have seen better usage of email capabilities than this. A few design tweaks would go a long ways, or at least I think so.

Email Update Interface

All interaction buttons in the email update will open a new window enabling actions like replying, retweeting, unfollowing, etc. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless the company you work for has blocked NutshellMail as well.

Button Interactions

Testing commenting, updating, tweeting, etc. from the email update (which opens a new window for all actions) seemed to work fine, although this isn’t an ideal option for those of you who live and breath social media. If you don’t need to interact too often and would like to get updates and notifications via email so you can stay productive, NutshellMail is a great option.

Final Thoughts

NutshellMail has a great idea going and it will certainly be a big help for many people, however, I think it needs some overall improvements. The email update interface and external interaction pages (when you click buttons like comment, reply, etc.) leaves something to be desired. With some design improvements and possibly some usability improvements, I think NutshellMail would be much more appealing.

For the younger crowd, I don’t think this is going to be a popular choice. For those in business environments, this might be a solution to many people’s problems. I can’t say I’ll continue using it but I know that if I did, I would likely be much more productive—so there’s something to be said about that.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on NutshellMail and what you like or dislike about it. Leave a comment below. Thanks!