I don’t know where this is going.

All I know is that what I need on a typical day is a quick overview of what’s happening on Facebook, Twitter, and now Google Buzz. Having three tabs open is impractical – and I simply can’t stand third-party apps that either (a) suck or (b) suck.

I’ve always found that the mobile (iPhone) interfaces for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz were fine and dandy – quite usable, really. The problem is: you can’t load the iPhone versions of Google Buzz and Twitter in a desktop browser without first spoofing your agent (which has to happen on the client side).

My original idea (and I’m still looking for help to get something like this accomplished) was to have a single Web page that would automatically load these three networks with their iPhone interfaces into three columns (using the IFRAME tag, assumedly). This is allegedly impossible to do without some kind of user intervention – which is to say, you can’t easily spoof a browser agent from the server side.

The solution? Maybe create a Google Chrome plugin. After all, both Chrome and the iPhone version of Safari are based on WebKit. This way, the spoofing could happen automatically from within the plugin – and it could run just about anywhere.

Given that I’m nowhere near a developer, I was left to my own devices. I created a Fluid.app instance of something that was previously a “pane” in the ass. Why not use Mozilla’s Prism? It’s nowhere near as configurable, and Gecko isn’t WebKit. ‘Nuff said. This was my solution for a problem *I* was having.

And so, I made Social Panes and sent it to a few friends to see if it’d work on their Macs as well. I actually have a better name for the app, but am holding onto it until I see if either a Web page (without plugin) or various browser extensions can be built.

It’s not perfect, mind you – but I did my best.

1. Unzip the contents of this download.
2. Move the “com.fluidapp.FluidInstance.Social Panes.plist” to /users/[username]/Library/Preferences
3. Open Safari and authenticate http://hahlo.com/ to your Twitter account (if you’ve never done so). NOTE: please use Safari, specifically.
4. Double-click “Social Panes” and you should see three panes & a drawer open up. The drawer is a bonus – FriendFeed.

The reason I chose Hahlo over mobile.twitter.com is simple: Hahlo is more full-featured and doesn’t log you out of other Twitter sessions when you’ve authenticated with it.

Again, I wish something like this could be accomplished from a Web page that didn’t require a plugin or download to work properly. Sorry. If someone else can pull that off, I’d be interested in talking about extending this idea.

Moreover, if you can improve upon a standalone binary, I’d be interested in hearing from you as well. This version was cobbled together as a fully-functional prototype (and is far from perfect).

Oh, and I’m not going to provide support for this app – so don’t ask me support questions. :) After all, I just did this for free (and if you wanted to send me a donation, it’s a different story).