As different friends sign up for different services, online life is getting more and more complex — and, frankly, I've been getting a little dizzy trying to keep up with it all. So I was very, very happy to find EventBox.
EventBox consolidates status updates, photos, tweets — even my Google Reader RSS subscriptions — into one clean, clear, organized interface. When my cousin uploads photos of her kids, they appear in my EventBox. When Barbara Moore tweets about sub-zero weather in Minneapolis, her tweet appears in my Event Box. When Knol Aust in Jackson uploads some of his stunning photography to Flickr.com, my EventBox displays a thumbnail of it and lets me know.
Simple. Easy. Attractive. Clever. Right now, even in beta, EventBox does a darn good job of lining up unruly online updates of virtually every stripe and marching 'em, organized and well-behaved, into a pleasant, easily-navigated space. If you got friends scattered over several services … EventBox feels like a godsend.
Update: As with most things, a little concentrated use reveals a few shortcomings:
– EventBox currently places all new events (new photos, new updates, new tweets) at the top of the list. That works well when I'm all caught up … it's best, in fact, because I see new updates the instant they arrive. But when I'm several dozen (or several hundred) updates behind, I want the oldest updates on top, so I can easily scroll down and read them in the order they arrived. Currently, not possible.
– EventBox includes a preview pane (called the "quick input pane") which, like its counterpart in mail, provides a preview of the selected photo or article. As I scroll through events, though, this pane appears, disappears, and resizes itself constantly, based on the kind of item I'm previewing. (For tweets, the preview pane is a tiny reply window … for photos, the pane displays the picture, etc.) This constant transformation distracts me. I want the window to stay where I put it, at the size I select, no matter what I'm previewing in it.
– Double-clicking any event the EventBox captures launches that event in a browser window. I like that behavior when I'm reading an article from my RSS reader … but I when I double-click a tweet, I generally want to reply to it, not see it reproduced full-screen in a browser window. I want to be able to set up, service by service, what double-clicking a particular kind of event will do.
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