TechCrunch 50 startup and runner-up Threadsy reached out to me earlier to look at their service. I’m not usually one to do that but I had some time and their street cred seemed legitimate (TC50, etc).

The service is an aggregation tool that pulls email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, even IMAP to name a few) together. I couldn’t get my IMAP email account functional but that could just be me. It’s been awhile since I had to configure email addresses manually. My Gmail account imported successfully without any special configuration.

In addition to email accounts, Threadsy also aggregates your Facebook Inbox as well as Twitter. Though no differentiation (visually) seems to exist for DMs and public messages in Twitter, it did manage to aggregate everything nicely and order them in the proper order. I’ve noticed that other products that trie to do this always seem to be a little glitchy on timestamps and sorting, so I appreciated this.

What you get is a consolidated inbox, as seen below. It’s very interactive and clicking on messages brings up helpful information about the sender.

The experience is also very smooth with interactive visual elements (swooshes and what not… to be technical).

My big question surrounding this service is why? There already seem to be a lot of social inbox tools. Gmail is increasingly becoming one everyday with the addition of Buzz, though it does not yet support aggregation of Twitter and Facebook content. I can see the benefits, but I wonder how many users will be sold on it.

Try it for yourself though. The first thousand people to click on this link get into the private beta program. Let me know how you feel about it.