MultiMi Brings Your Entire Online Presence Under One AVG-Secured Client

Note: This software has been discontinued. The file has been removed at the vendor’s request.

How do you control your ever-increasing number of social networks and activities? Most either keep their networks separated, or use social clients such as HootSuite or TweetDeck to aggregate their social activities under one roof. These are great options for controlling your social accounts, and sometimes even your blog, but what about email, calendar, media and documents? A new free solution from AVG aims to bring all these activities under one client called MultiMi.

Many things about MultiMi sound innovative and exciting. To start, it aggregates much more than just social accounts. Aside from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, MultiMi also includes your emails, photos, Google Calendar and Google Docs, among other services. In addition, its AVG origins bring AVG link scanning to all your social activities, protecting you from dubious links and phishing scams.

In practice, however, MultiMi seems to have bitten a bit more than it can chew. Upon launching it for the first time, MultiMi will prompt you to add your accounts. Here, already, some problems arise; for example, the connection to Facebook chat failed without further explanation, only to suddenly connect without notice several days later. Once your accounts are linked, MultiMi will take a while to synchronize your activities, which can now be browsed through the left sidebar.

MultiMi’s sidebar is divided into 10 tabs, including a customizable Home tab, Messages, Social, Events, Reader, Photos, and even a built-in browser. Moving between tabs is a slow affair, at least on my 2.2GHz, 4GB machine, and even after all items load once, there’s still quite a wait when switching tabs.

Looking at the imported content in MultiMi, I saw that almost nothing made it through in one piece. Google Reader feeds were stripped of their folders, Picasa photos simply never made it, Facebook content took a very long while to appear, and not all unread emails appeared as they should. To top it all off, Google Talk showed only one contact out of dozens, and a spell-check bug marked correctly spelled words and included the mark in an outgoing email.

On the positive side, MultiMi does let you send updates, emails and files from one slick, centralized interface. Adding files is done by a simple drag and drop, and files can be shared on social networks or simply uploaded to Picasa, Google Docs or Box.net. You can also save drafts of your Facebook and Twitter updates to send at a later time, although a post scheduler is still missing.

The killer feature, and the one I will probably come back to MultiMi for, is the ability to search through all your networks for one keyword or phrase. In theory, you can also use the interface to view only photos and media from your feeds, but this worked only partially, pulling photos mainly from Facebook.

The addition of some useful features and improvement of the current ones could turn MultiMi into a decent and secure control center for your online life. All in all, MultiMi feels like a great effort, but one which is not quite baked yet.