Fuser: Not the MySpace Killer I Hoped It Would Be

Occasionally, I get really excited reading my news feeds. I love writing about tech because tech is what I'm reading and ranting about half the time anyway, but one of the downsides to covering Web 2.0 is that you end up registering at far more sites than you will ever be able to use on a regular basis. Inevitably, you whittle down your number of regular visits, but there are always sites that get left behind, and people you may want to keep in touch with there. And so it went when I followed the rest of the lemmings and headed on over to Facebook, leaving my MySpace profile nearly deserted. There were still people on MySpace who haven't and/or won't move over to Facebook or whatever the Next Big Thing will be, but it's hard keeping up with them. Reports of Fuser being the thing that helps pack up all that old baggage and moves it to Facebook sounded too good to be true. And I guess for me at least, they were.

Fuser has been around a while now, providing an ad-based system that collects all your email and social networking messages in one place. However, their Facebook app is something new, a tool that allows you to pull MySpace data into Facebook and read it within Facebook. Every headline I've seen uses "MySpace Killer" but it's far from a MySpace killer. It may be kicking MySpace in the shins, but it has tiny little shoes.

The two biggest things I'm still using MySpace for are keeping up with friends who blog there and sampling new music. MySpace got popular on the backs of bands who found an outlet to getting their music directly to an audience without having to rely on commercial radio to do it. A quick glance through my iTunes library shows me at least five albums I'd never have heard of if it hadn't been for MySpace.

The Fuser Facebook app, however, is working within the minimalistic constraints of the Facebook app, which means no colors, no backgrounds (actually, none of the gaudiness of MySpace), but also no music samples, no blog feeds, and nothing else of real interest. It's limited to pulling in nothing more than your comments, messages, and bulletins from your friends, a lot of which just feels out of context in Facebook.

On top of that, either it's buggy on a Mac, or the app still has kinks that need to be worked out, because every time I load the Fuser app, it rechecks my Java, then cycles through blue bars trying to load the two recent comments I've had. I can't imagine if I had more comments.

I'm still waiting for the perfect aggregator that will get all my stuff in one place. OnaSwarm just dumped too much information on me with no attention management. Fuser gives me much too small a slice.