Sharing and cross-sharing of information across platforms is the new trend and very useful if you want to cover various forums to disseminate information. For a blogger it is vital to distribute links to their posts across various platforms. Here is where I found Flexamail quite handy. It is a service which allows you to send and retrive information to Twitter and Facebook without even the need to visit any webpage. All you need is to log into your email account.
About Flexamail?
- First I needed to register with Flexamail with my Email Id.
- The I had to configure with my username and password for Facebook and Twitter.
- Finally I was set to start using Twitter and Facebook with my Email account.
How does it work?
- When I sent a email to particular email address of Flexamail I could send a tweet and update my Facebook wall.
- What I type in the subject line is sent over as a tweet while what is in the body of the email message is posted on your Facebook Wall.
- It also has other options to check 10 recent wall updates, 20 tweets from friends and also helpful in sharing images.
Here is a short video demo I made while I tested Flexamail
Examples:
tweet@flexamail.com (sends subject line as tweet on twitter)
fbwall@flexamail.com (sends email body as post on Facebook Wall)
Try it out but visiting Flexamail and use your email to control Facebook and Twitter account. Let me know your view through your comments.
Awesome yar. @ my work place all are blocked. So I can give a try to this. Thanks.
@Sriram: Yes its quite an interesting hack for people who have blocked websites at their workplace.
Thanks for sharing this post..This is really an awesome application for those who are not able to open fb or twitter at their workplace.
How safe is it to share your password for FB/Twitter on a third party site? Cannt this be done through an OAuth Mechanism instead of asking a user to share his/her password. I smell a scam behind the curtains here.
Hi Abhishek Kumar,
As one of the people behind Flexamail, I agree with you 100% it is never safe to trust a site with your Facebook or Twitter accounts in this day and age. That said, Flexamail uses OAuth for both Facebook and Twitter access, you never have to give your password and all that is stored on our servers is your oAuth key, which we encrypt just to be safe.
This video shows the process of configuring Facebook, as you can see, all the authorization are done on the Facebook end. Additionally, you can turn off Flexamail access at any time in Facebook under the application Settings.
http://www.flexamail.com/video/facebook.mp4
and this one shows Twitter
http://www.flexamail.com/video/twitter.mp4
So, I can assure you, no scam here.
@Aditya Kane, thanks for the great write-up.
During development, we hadn’t actually considered using Twitter and Facebook in a single email. We even now have some users doing uber combinations, posting an image, tweeting, updating and downloading Twitter and Facebook all in a single email. Very neat to see people do stuff you had never expected!
It is a sad day when productivity in the work place is superseded by living your life vicariously in the self-indulgent, narcissistic world of ‘social networks’.
So congratulations Twitter, FaceBook and all the others like them and those that support such drivel with applications like this and others, your Spin Doctors have well earned their pay.
@Talamasca: interesting point of view, but many stats through many polls have suggested people are more productive today than they were 10 or even 20 years ago. No one would actually suggest that social networking websites have made people more efficient. Actually the answer to all these concerns are simple. Work places should be more about getting X amount of work done in specific time. If you send 2 hours on FB or Twitter or spend all the time working with out a harmless break is immaterial.
Good going Aditya. This article is featured now featured on Lifehacker!
@Dnyanesh: Thanks
@Mike: Great, thanks for clearing those points.
@Aditya: Point taken on taking a break. But 2 hours a day? I would love a job that would afford me two hours a day to do what I wished on their payroll.
Ask yourself as honestly and unbiased as you can; If it were not an issue, would there be a need for this service? I think not.
Thanks for sharing this information. As far as posting goes, ping.fm works as well for status updates to multiple sites. Connected to your phone you can SMS text updates over the cellular network.
@Talamsca, I think social networking sites are being unfairly maligned in the workplace. Yes, of course they can be a giant time sink, but the reality is most users that would spend a vast majority of their time on social networks instead of working would probably spend just as much time by the proverbial water cooler. Hell, when I was a smoker the number of people I saw out on smoke breaks throughout the day probably represented way more lost productivity than Twitter or Facebook ever have.
As Aditya said, productivity in is an upward arc, so I dont think things are all that bad. I guess it all depends on if you prescribe to the theory that a happy employee is a productive employee. I can only say from personal experience, this has basically been complete truth for me.
Oh, and I feel I should point out, there is more to Flexamail than just a firewall circumvention tool. Actually, the most mentioned features weren’t actually even part of the initial idea, although they have certainly proven the most popular. The general theme of Flexamail from design day one, was to make a tool that allows people to do almost everything from their email using a consistent experience.
@Aditya Kane, Congrats on the Lifehacker mention. Oh, and thanks for the LifeHacker mention! That was truly a trial by fire for our servers…. thankfully we survived.
Seriously, your mention has turned into a giant boon and you have our appreciation for that. Next time we have a big feature announcement or something similar, I will make sure you get the exclusive announcement if you want it.
@Mike: Yup, we certainly would love to cover some new exclusively… thanks..