Review: Fuser.Com

• May 28th, 2008
• Joseph Crawford
• 8:26 AM (GMT-4)
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After writing my review of Orgoo yesterday I was emailed by a woman named Emily. She said that she was from Fuser.com and wanted me to write a review of their service because they offered many of the features that Orgoo was lacking. Things such as the in-box columns that were re-sizable, etc..

While they do not yet offer the instant messaging which is a huge drawback for me. They do offer integration into MySpace and Facebook. The integration seems pretty good. Although it is not something that I would use on a daily basis. It allows you to quickly see who has messaged you, your top friends based on comment / message activity etc. Again this is not something that I would use on a daily basis so I will not go into too much detail about it here.

After signing up for the service there were a few drawbacks that I noticed immediately. I will cover those further down, first let’s focus on what they offer and my overall thoughts of the service. Fuser is a portal where you can add your e-mail accounts so that they are in a centralized location. This is key to anyone who does much traveling at all because it allows you to check your e-mails from anywhere, whether they are Pop, Imap, Gmail, etc. Having everything in one location is very nice. The inbox they developed is not like any other sites that I have seen thus far. They seem to be using Java for the site along with ASP.NET for the back-end. It really does not matter to me what technologies they use so long as the site is fast, easy to navigate, easy on the eyes and well organized.

While Fuser offers e-mail in a centralized location I feel they are lacking quite a bit. I do not see a way to import your contacts from other services like GMail, LinkedIn, etc. In fact I do not see a way to have a contact list at all. This is a big drawback. Why would I want my stuff in a centralized location and not be able to have all of my contacts right there with it? Ok so back to the e-mail in-box interface. I do not like the fact that there is no preview pane like Orgoo and almost every desktop e-mail clients have. When you click on a message you should see the body of the message load in the window below the message list. In Fuser currently you have to click on the message to see it open up in a new window. This just adds more complexity and more tasks for me to do when I simply want to read a message. There is more clicking involved as it takes a double click to open it and a clicks to scroll down the message and a click to close it. It would be much easier on the user if you could just click on the message and see it in the same window. I did receive an e-mail from Eric Wu that was clarifying the contact list issue. Below is his response

Oh, one clarification. We do automatically import all contacts from the accounts that get set up, but it’s not evident at first glance since we haven’t built the contact manager feature yet. What this means is that when you’re composing a new message (or adding addresses to a forward or reply) you can start typing the address or the name of the person and we’ll auto-match the address based on your existing contacts. This feature should look very similar to the way Gmail matches contact addresses to strings being entered into To: fields.

When first loading up the e-mail in-box it seems to take a few seconds to load. Now this would be fine if I were on a 3mbit cable connection but I am on a 20 / 20 mbit FIOS connection. If the in-box is slow on my connection I would hate to see how slow it is on a typical cable connection. Overall I currently do not like the interface that Fuser offers. It seems to be scattered about and not really well thought out.

One thing that they do offer is the ability to integrate Google Apps. This is a big plus for me since my work uses Google Apps for their email server. It was nice to be able to add my work account and have it right there with my personal stuff. When trying to add my MySpace account at first I was getting unknown errors from the site. It would not allow me to add my account. I sent the Java Console log over to Emily and she was having the technicians look into the problem. Today however I got it to add the account. I am not sure if they fixed the issue or if the issue was that my browser already had a cookie set stating that I was logged into MySpace.

The staff over at Fuser have asked me to be completely up front and honest about their service in this review. I have done so. I do not find this service to be that “great” at this time, however what they do offer for features seem to work and work well. Aside from being a bit sluggish (I think this is due to using Java) everything seems to work good. I have not tested the Facebook integration and do not plan to since I do not use Facebook. I love how they have the header columns in the in-box but this is not a service that I will be using. Things they could focus on for future features would be IM and an address book. I would also like to see them get away from Java, it’s really not the best technology to use these days. I would also love to see the ability to add RSS Feeds somewhere so that you can have all of your news updated right there as well.

Another thing that I see being an issue is only if you have a lot of e-mail / social networking accounts. The way they have the in-box setup is to have a horizontal bar above the in-box that lists the accounts side by side. You can click on each account to see messages from that account, you can turn all accounts off and only turn on those accounts that you wish to see at that moment. While this is a very nice feature I think that if you have multiple accounts it will either break the site design by overflowing the area meant for them or it will wrap and look bad. I think they need to figure out another method for dealing with this type of functionality.

If you are looking to get your e-mail and social networking stuff I think this site would be a good fit for you. However if you are looking for a more robust feature set there are other sites out there that have these abilities. I have also been told by the Fuser staff that they are going to be undergoing a re-design of the site. This re-design will include a preview pane that I have been stating they are lacking. I hope that the re-design also offers a better and easier site to navigate. I will be posting another review once the site is updated with the new design and the new features that they plan to integrate. For now I will stick with Orgoo and see what they offer in the near future.