For some time now I was searching for a web tool that could bring at least some of my major web accounts (including social networking sites) under the same roof. There are quite a few that promise to deliver what but I guess the real future in this segment is awaiting Google's Carnegie Mellon experiment with SocialStream to yield some meaningful results. Until then Gathera proved at least to me to be the closest you can get to integrating all of them... well not really as there is a limited number of sites they support but most of the main ones are there including AOL, digg, facebook, flickr, LinkedIN, myspace, twitter, youtube, windows live and Yahoo mail.
So off I went and first installed it (mind you, it is in the form of either IE or Firefox add on) on my wife's computer with WinXP. Installation completed, she registered and then one by one included all of her major sites. Excellent or so I thought! I hoped to achieve the same results on my monster with Vista. Ah, well, not really! The installation was spotless but then the problems appeared out of nowhere which is a kind of my usual experience with Vista. I restarted Firefox as instructed and clicked on the "G" button next to the address line and it simply reported "Gathera was not installed successfully". Oh come on, we all know this not to be true but it is Vista that complicates things by being smart - so much for the smart systems! I contacted Gathera developers and they suggested using IE instead but in an unprotected mode. Whatever the case, I didn't like the prospect of working in that mode and I also don't like IE. The decision was made in an instant, I've got to figure out how the whole thing works and so I did and now want to share this with you. By the way, make sure you clear cache in Firefox before installation. Here it is:
1. Do not click on "restart Firefox" when download is complete as prompted! Simply ignore it and close down Add-ons window and then close down Firefox as you usually do.
2. Believe it or not but you've got to restart your computer, start Firefox and click "Allow" when prompted. Firefox will start, so click on "G" for Gathera just next to the address line.
3. Gathera sidebar will open and you should then register and do the rest as instructed.
Here you go, simple and I have no idea why it doesn't work if you DO press "restart Firefox" button. Just one of many signs that Vista is already dead. I hope Windows 7 is really better. I shall report on that too.
