If the Internet could be summarized in 3 simple words in today’s life, then they would surely be Social Networks, E-mails and IM’s.
LiveGo is a website that takes this concept and offers the best of all the 3 to its users in a single place. With LiveGo, users can stay connected to their social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Instant Messengers such as MSN or Live, Yahoo and Gtalk and email accounts as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.
The home page shows you various sign in options. A good thing about this website is that uses do not need to create a separate login account. Instead, they can directly use their Facebook, MSN, Twitter, Yahoo, Gmail or AOL accounts to sign in.
When I logged in using my Facebook account, I was extremely pleased to see the overall interface. The majority of the space was rightly occupied with the news feed and the right sidebar showed me a list of my online friends. The left sidebar was similar to that of Facebook with options for Messages, Albums, Friends, and Notifications etc. An update bar on the top allows users to share their updates on Facebook and Twitter. A separate pop-up window opens for chatting when either you receive a PM or when you double click on any icon on the messenger window. A webcam icon on the top right of the PM window indicates webcam chat option. However, this feature is not yet available and hovering the cursor over the icon will only show you a “Coming Soon” message. One appreciable feature of the news feed was that taking the cursor over any picture automatically showed an enlarged view of it, certainly saving a few clicks and unnecessary page loading.
My next step was activating my Twitter account on the site. Clicking on the “Activate” link under the Twitter tab or the “Add Account” button on the left sidebar did the job pretty fast. Also the dashboard now included feeds from both the social networks. Separate Facebook and Twitter Tabs can let the users view feeds from either of the social network. Hovering the cursor over any display pic in the twitter feed will open a pop up giving you details of the user such as webpage, bio, number of followers, updates etc and the option to follow/unfollow, message or block the particular user.
Adding an email account automatically included my contacts in the messenger window and showed the online contacts by default. All options such as composing a new email or checking the inbox, drafts or sent items along with labels were available. Moreover, users can add multiple accounts for the same email provider and simultaneously access both of them. This way, if you have 2 or more accounts in Gmail or Yahoo, you no longer need to sign in and out of each account to access them. No doubt, this will come as a bliss for users with multiple accounts.
The overall layout of the site is impressive and users who still feel the need for more space for feeds can hide both the sidebars by clicking on the left and right arrows of the top of each sidebar respectively. Ads are placed on a thin bottom bar and are non intrusive in nature.
In a nutshell, LiveGo does what it promises, that is, it helps you stay connected with multiple social networks, e-mail accounts and send and receive IM’s at a single place. Users who find themselves wasting more of their time switching among various tabs and windows will find this as a felicity and a one stop solution for most of their online needs.
Gourav Mittal is a Computer Science Engineer who loves to blog in his free time. He blogs primarily at Techrav and also maintains Sanjay Tea Company
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