Webware

Awesome Web 2.0 communications de-cluttering tool Orgoo is set to open its doors in the next couple of months. Its creators wouldn't pin down an exact date to me, but they have been nice enough to give Webware readers 500 invites to use the system in full before it's open to all (go here to get yours). The expansion of the beta is the last step before going open, and is for both scaling servers and getting more user feedback.

I've been using the tool on and off since I wrote about it in September of last year. I prefer its mail UI to Fuser, a similar service that's recently begun to integrate a slew of third-party services like Facebook's news feed and microblogging services like Twitter. Orgoo has taken a slightly more focused approach, expanding its compatibility with e-mail services and IM networks. Most recently, it dipped into multi-user video chat, which launched back in March.

Like online financial services such as Mint and PageOnce, Orgoo requires you to put a whole bunch of login credentials in the hands of a third party, something I don't think most people are comfortable with. The upside to that is you can manage and use five or more e-mail accounts and talk with all your chat buddies in one place--all without any software. You can read our original hands-on with the service here.

Josh and I spent a day working the Under the Radar conference last week (see all stories). Actually, Josh was working; I was onstage hustling start-ups on and off the stage. We saw about 40 business-related Web 2.0 companies. Most of them were very early-stage, so you might not want to entrust your business to them. But there were several apps that were more developed, and a few that are worth looking at even though they're not.

As I wrote after the Demo conference, I am amazed by what people are doing with Flash and AIR apps. Two apps from Under the Radar, Blist and SlideRocket, are Flash apps. Neither are available to the public just yet, but when they ship be sure to check them out.

There were a lot of good apps at the show, but we selected five that really stood out. Watch the video to learn why, in addition to Blist and SlideRocket, we picked Orgoo, Vello, and Nuconomy as our Best Five apps from Under the Radar.

Orgoo, one of my favorite communication aggregation services, quietly launched a new video-chat service yesterday. It lets anyone create a text chat room with four spots for Web cam video and audio without any sort of registration or software besides Adobe's Flash plug-in. I gave it a spin earlier today and came away impressed.

Like the company's multiclient e-mail and chat mashup, which I checked out back in September, it's been designed with simplicity in mind and setup is about as easy as it gets. Users can privatize chat rooms simply by providing a password and can brand the room with a logo or photo from their hard drives.

After a room has been created, it will remain live even after all the members have left--all you need is the permalink and password to return to it later. The implementation reminds me a lot of MeBeam, an instant video-chat service we played with internally but never wrote about.

In terms of integration with Orgoo's core service, which will likely open up from its current private beta later this month at the Under the Radar conference, the video chat simply takes up a new tab in between the e-mail and regular text-chat buddy list. It also inherits the right-click contextual menus that are often an overlooked, yet satisfying addition to Flash-based applications.

The video-chat app joins a slew of others including the aforementioned MeBeam, Tokbox, and ooVoo, along with the recently released Yahoo Live.

[via TechCrunch]

Chat with as many people as you'd like, and video chat with up to four people at the same time, all in the same place with Orgoo chat.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A few weeks ago I got to play around with Orgoo, a multi-client e-mail and IM service that's still in private beta. Right around the same time, another e-mail aggregation service, called Fuser, opened up its doors to everyone. Fuser, like Orgoo, lets you pull in a number of Webmail accounts from popular services, and view them in the same in-box, with handy color coding and several ways to separate which in-box you're looking at. Unlike its competitors however, Orgoo forgoes the instant messaging angle in place of integrating social networks, almost like what Flock offered when it first started out.

For now, Fuser is limited to MySpace and Facebook, although the company intends to expand into Orkut and others in the future. You can check out personal messages, or wall/comment posts for each of your accounts, as well as send new ones out like you would an e-mail. There's also a really neat "leaderboard" that will figure out how many times you've gone back and forth with one of your social networking contacts (for MySpace and Facebook), then place them in hierarchical importance. As Fuser's President Jeff Herman told me, this system trumps MySpace's top friends concept on a statistical level by actually showing you (privately) who you're chatting with the most. In my case, the results were surprising.

As far as an e-mail client goes, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, there's a whole lot here, like being able to hot swap which e-mail account you want the message to be from, and a quick autofill of your contact once you start typing out their name--not too shabby considering it's pulling in all that information from all over the Web.

My beef has to do with speed. It's a little bit too slow at this point to ditch your current Webmail provider. My shortest time for opening an e-mail was around 4 seconds, with the longest taking a full 12 seconds from when I clicked on the message to when I first saw text. For one or two messages this is fine, but if you plan on attacking several messages (which you likely are with multiple accounts), the lag puts a damper on the experience.

Despite the speed issue, I really like Fuser's openness. Even Orgoo, for its good looks and slightly faster performance, still required you to have a premium version of Yahoo and Hotmail to get in on the fun, whereas you can do it with any old free account on Fuser. The social networking angle is what's key here, and I think if they can improve on the speed, and add some more social sites, they might be able to do some of the cool things Flock and Plaxo are doing with social contacts and messaging management while maintaining their mailcentric roots.

View the mail on all your accounts, even the ones that get a bunch of BACN and spam.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Orgoo is a new service for aggregating all sorts of communication platforms together, in one solution. The easiest way to describe it is a mix between a Web mail client and an IM app. You might say, "well my Gmail and Yahoo Mail already have IM built in." To that I'd say you're right, but Orgoo's take is a little bit like Meebo--take all your existing services and integrate them together in one place.

To start out, just plug in any accounts you want to access. Orgoo will handle five of the major IM clients, along with a handful of Web mail providers including Gmail, .Mac, and Yahoo and Microsoft's premium Hotmail services. You can also drop in any old e-mail account that can be accessed via POP or IMAP. The service can save your passwords and login information, so every time you log in to Orgoo, it will pull in each and every account. I found it really helpful with Gmail, since I could be logged into several accounts at once--which usually requires juggling two different kinds of browsers.

Orgoo's interface is a mishmash of the classical mail inbox. Besides your e-mail reader, which takes on an appearance much like that of Yahoo Mail, you've also got an entire buddy list that resides on the right side of the screen. Orgoo employs drag-and-drop to organize your messages and IMchat logs, and you've got a list of folders which can contain several levels of user created nesting; meaning you can store a message within a folder within a folder within a folder, to your heart's content. You can also organize your IMs into tabs on the top, or pop them out (virtual-desktop style) if it's easier for you to manage.