Nowadays we spend a great deal of time on Facebook, Twitter, Skype and WhatsApp for both work and personal reasons. As they don’t have their own PC or Mac program, we have to keep the browser open with a tab or window for each social network.
Social networks form an important part of our daily personal and professional lives, as we use them for contacting work colleagues, clients, friends and relatives without limits in terms of distance and time.
However, it is common to use more than one social network or messaging service, which means that we end up installing several apps on our mobile devices and computers, one for each service.
If we are able to manage several email accounts by means of a single program and access thousands of websites using a single browser, why can’t we do the same with our social network profiles?
Franz is an app available for Windows, Mac and Linux which allows you to access the instant messaging services of different social networks from one window in a single app.
Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack, WeChat… you’ll thus be able to communicate with your contacts from different instant messaging services and social networks via a single window on your computer.
In addition, you’ll be able to receive and send emails using Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail/Outlook. And not only that; if you manage several accounts from the same service, you can also organize them in Franz.
It works very simply. The installation is very straightforward and you only have to configure each of the accounts you’re going to use in Franz. To do this, you’ll see a list of icons with the compatible messaging services and social networks. When following the instructions you’ll just have to enter your username or ID and your password and the service will be displayed as activated every time you open Franz on your PC or Mac.
Franz is a good way of unifying all your means of communication but also of accessing others which are not available on your PC or Mac, such as WhatsApp. Obviously, Franz’s interface is different from those of each of the official apps, but it provides their the most important features, such as the sharing of files or links and the use of emojis and stickers.
We should also mention the use of keyboard shortcuts to activate options more quickly than if you do so manually or with the mouse.
If you are worried about what happens to your messages and correspondence in Franz, its director clarifies that the app only acts as an intermediary, in other words, the information which is sent enjoys the security provided by each service used and Franz does not save anything.
Franz has improved a great deal since its first version, including more compatible services with each edition. If you can’t find a social network or messaging service, you can contact its author and ask for it or wait for the next version.
You can find further information on Franz on its official website.
