Alert Thingy Releases Major Update. With and Without Friendfeed Support.

AlertThingy which originally launched as a Friendfeed desktop tool has released a major update however this time round, it’s not what we all expected. The team at Howard Baines have released two versions of the application, one supporting a number of different social networks title AlertThingyV2 and another (called the Friendfeed Edition) which is specifically for Friendfeed.

With AlertThingy V2 a number of changes have been made. Firstly, the team have steered away from AIR with AJAX, HTML and CSS to a purely Flex based application. Secondly, you can now not only tweet but also update your Facebook status, post to Tumblr, upload to Flickr, Digg items in the stream and it also has it’s own built-in RSS reader.

The new Friendfeed edition of the application doesn’t seem to have too many new features however it has apparently been “revised” with more updates on the way.

The reasoning behind excluding Friendfeed entirely from the main version:

“AlertThingy wants to be the social desktop application of choice but this actually interferes with the reason for being of FriendFeed, that pulls together all your social networking data inside your browser.

Forgive my negativity, but I am disappointed.

As wonderful as the AlertThingyV2 may be, if there was one company/application which I had hoped would really pull off Friendfeed on the desktop – it was Howard Baines and Alert Thingy.

I hope I’m wrong here but I don’t believe we’ll see many Friendfeed Edition updates. Lets face it, Alert Thingy’s most recent update has taken months and that is just one application. Now the Howard Baines boys have two to manage and I  for one, just can’t see it working out. Part of me just wishes they had focused on developing solely for Friendfeed, it’s a clear niche waiting to get filled and they already had a lengthy step into with the amount of coverage they received from V1.

Above all howver, I’m beginning to feel that Friendfeed on the desktop is just too big a pain for anyone to pull off. On Friendfeed, you’ve not only got the main stream to manage but also lists, rooms and the sharing/subscription between them…(sigh) maybe Friendfeed is best left on the web?

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Techcrunch, Howard/Baines Blog, Alert Thingy