My strategy to create an unlimited amount of accounts on social networks has always been to start from Yahoo! Mail because the service does not require a primary email address to sign you up. Gmail does. And Google Apps don’t seem to like multiple accounts that have the same primary email. However, this technique implied keeping a record of all accounts created on Yahoo, and on Google.
Recently, I came across the secondary email address feature from Yahoo! (maybe I am a little late on this, I can barely find fresh info on this feature). Basically, for 15 euros a year ($21), you pick a prefix for your secondary email address, and you get to create 500 different email addresses starting with this prefix.
Example:
prefix = other
address = yahoo.com
You can create = other-twitter@yahoo.com, other-digg@yahoo.com, other-amazon@yahoo.com…
The purpose of secondary addresses is to let users create a vast number of sub-communication channels with unknown entities (a new social network, a site’s newsletter…), and get the flexibility to block a channel if it starts to deliver spam. This is probably more efficient than a spam filter that sometimes gets it right, sometimes gets it wrong. I like this idea and I wish Google had a similar feature in its Lab.
Lately, I have been experiementing a bit with Twitter and the power of automating retweets. This experiment obviously requires opening several Twitter accounts and find an easy way to manage all the activity from one place. By coupling Topify with the power of secondary email addresses from Yahoo, I have no sweat managing multiple accounts from the same inbox. It’s almost what Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck provides, except that it’s in your email inbox (and it’s less complex).
Today, we are in a complete information overload age because we do not know how to control the sudden over-sharing of content via social networks. I found that the best way to control my online social life was to have a powerful email provider that lets me interact with a mutlitude of social platforms from the comfort of my email inbox.