Ekko hopes you're willing to pay for a better social media experience
Ekko is a premium umbrella service that unifies your most-used social networks and email programs in an easy-to-use interface. For your monthly subscription of $5 a month (or $50 per year), you also have access to security controls that can be applied to any message sent from any of your linked accounts. You can add password protection to your messages or set them to self-destruct after a certain amount of time or number of views. Recipients view your messages in a secure browsing session.
The best part: You can search every account directly from Ekko instead of scouring your messages or emails within each app. Ekko can also pull in search results from Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and Duck Duck Go.
Ekko CEO Rick Peters says he and his team built the service to aggregate and integrate information across the various networks and programs we use every day, making them easy to filter through and manage. Peters, who has a medical background and founded a handful of health tech startups, also believes the time has come for a service that's serious about privacy--and that people will pay to keep companies out of their business. (You won't see ads on Ekko.)
"We find communicating across various apps, there's a lot of noise," Peters said. "What we wanted to do was find a way to consolidate messaging. And we felt strongly that we could build something without having to compromise people's privacy or scan their messages or track them."
The web platform and iOS app currently support iCloud, Exchange, Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, POP3, and IMAP email accounts. On the social networking front, Ekko supports Facebook and Twitter, but is working to integrate Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Pocket, Evernote, and Box are potential additions down the road. You can link an unlimited number of accounts to Ekko and manage them all in one place, a privilege that might just be worth paying for.