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April 13, 2008

AlertThingy, The FriendFeed Desktop Application, Launches

Michael Arrington

44 comments »

AlertThingy, the Adobe AIR desktop application for FriendFeed that we previewed last month, has just launched. It is one of the first applications built on the new FriendFeed API.

The application allows users to see the data stream from people they follow on FriendFeed, and post new messages directly to the service. Users can also comment on posted items, and bookmark them. And possibly the best feature: it includes FriendFeed search.

Alert Thingy is now the second Adobe AIR application that is running full time on my desktop (the other is Twhirl, for Twitter). I expect it will be very popular with the Centralized Me crowd.

The application was created by Howard/Baines.

See Sobees for another desktop FriendFeed application, although it runs only on Windows machines. AIR applications are cross platform.

CrunchBase Information
Alert Thingy
FriendFeed
Adobe Systems
Information provided by CrunchBase
  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 5:31 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Finally a Way To Use FriendFeed : East Coast Blogging

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  5. Alert Thingy Desktop App Wasn’t Worth The Wait | SheGeeks

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  7. Интернетные штучки » Alert Thingy: AIR клиент для FriendFeed

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  9. Twitter support coming to AlertThingy? « Boston Internet Marketing

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Comments

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  1. Tony Hung

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:44 am

    Sobees rather sucked. It forced you to download the NET framework and its interface as well has left something to be desired. *BEES*?! Honeycombs? Come on, man. I suspect most people trying this out are not 14 year old girls (no malignment intended to any 14 year old girls).

    t @ dji

  2. Christian Bogh

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:48 am

    Sounds awesome - great to have something like this running all the time. But I see a danger (for me that is) that I never will have the time to work with this tool :)

  3. funnyguy

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:49 am

    I agree with Tommy. I’ve tried this thing and it isn’t so useful for me.

  4. Michael Arrington

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:51 am

    funnyguy - who’s tommy?

    Tony - sobees sucks indeed. that’s why we threw it into crunchbase, never covered it on techcrunch

  5. kuldeep

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:52 am

    They should have given option to decrease the transparency…its annoying

  6. Michael Arrington

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:55 am

    kuldeep - agree. suspect it will be coming.

  7. kuldeep

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:04 am

    plus - if they let us update twitter messages, I think twhirl would be in danger…or may be still not..thy will have to provide more options for twitter…lets c…im confused.. : )

  8. Michael Arrington

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:11 am

    kuldeep - agree - these apps need to converge, and find a way to provide lots of functionality with a simple UI. whoever wants it most will win.

  9. Orli Yakuel

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:13 am

    Looks great.

    Settings however, missing some important adjustment:
    Color, sound, notifications, hide when minimized etc,.

  10. Tony Hung

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:14 am

    @Mike — “Tommy” is the most benign of mis-appellations that have been attributed to me. “William” is far more frequent (and ‘original’) :)

  11. Jeremy Baines

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:25 am

    Anyone wanting to follow Alert Thingy updates, progress or other apps we are working on - http://twitter.com/jeremybaines - http://friendfeed.com/jeremybaines

  12. Alicia

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:25 am

    They are trying best to make it the best and safest social network online.. Hope they succeeds. :)

  13. kuldeep

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:29 am

    I just realized….The problem with combining twitter and alertthingy/friendfeed is now i will have to follow all on friendfeed as well as twitter…yeah it sucks…its too much of a work…lets on leave twhirl

  14. faizal

    April 13th, 2008 at 6:32 am

    socialthing is better!

  15. Voyagerfan5761

    April 13th, 2008 at 7:09 am

    Found some annoyances of my own. I won’t re-state myself, though; just have at my blog post: http://voyagerfan5761.blogspot.....dfeed.html

  16. Webmaster

    April 13th, 2008 at 7:10 am

    Hmm, for me it looks usefull and i like friendfeed, so i may give it a try.

  17. Michael Arrington

    April 13th, 2008 at 7:26 am

    http://friendfeed.com/techcrunch

  18. Michael Arrington

    April 13th, 2008 at 8:06 am

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamposey/2410565178/

  19. jilm

    April 13th, 2008 at 8:38 am

    This all should be integrated into IM, let´s say to Pidgin. That´s exactly the perfect place to watch others´ activity.

  20. 113.com

    April 13th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    Didn’t most think the Desktop already dead???

  21. Sopalin

    April 13th, 2008 at 9:23 am

    Friendfeed is really going to help me . I have too much social networks to manage today.

  22. Juhani Polkko

    April 13th, 2008 at 10:27 am

    The only thing really left for me to be completely synced up, is to have my Windows Live Messenger status updated from the web or vice versa. Anybody know if that’s possible yet?

  23. bob cobb

    April 13th, 2008 at 10:42 am

    This post finally got me to sign up for Friendfeed. I figured I might as well before my name is taken on there

  24. xxdesmus

    April 13th, 2008 at 11:19 am

    A direct link for the AIR file would be nice, the webpage-based installers never work correctly…

  25. xxdesmus

    April 13th, 2008 at 11:24 am

    On the 8th or 9th click the webpage-based installer worked, finally.

    Gratuitous use of transparency? Yup.
    To the point it’s actually difficult to use? Yup.
    Setting to change said transparency to a suitable level? Nope.

    It’s a promising start, but it’s still very very rough. I’ll keep an eye on this, but it’s not very useful right now.

  26. The Team

    April 13th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    FriendFeed is cool, and this Thingy looks like it will push mobile social-networking up another notch, too.
    Watch for clones; Imitation is the purest form of flattery..

    The Team
    http://wirelessspeech.blogspot.com

  27. Anatoly

    April 13th, 2008 at 5:21 pm

    The litmus test — explaining this to my grandmother…

    Whats alert thingy?
    Well, it helps you watch your friend feed feed.

    Whats friendfeed?
    Well, its a way to watch your twitter.

    Whats twitter?
    Well its a way to communicate to a group of people, mostly in real time. Email is so last century.

    Whats email?

  28. Avdi

    April 13th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

    If by “cross-platform” you mean Windows, Mac OS X, and hobbled half-working alpha on Linux. Linux is as much a second-class citizen in the AIR world as it was for so many years in the Flash world.

  29. Terry Templington

    April 13th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

    excellent app, except it’s really hard on the eyes. black semitransparent background, white text. how might i adjust these settings?

  30. PaulC

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:58 am

    Nice app.
    I like having everything on my desktop and alert thingy starts to bring FriendFeed to my desktop. Although I wouldn’t mind more features from it, but then they would have to call it “more than just alerts… thingy”

    With alert thingy installed I will probably actually use FriendFeed now. :)

  31. Rafael Dohms

    April 17th, 2008 at 12:44 pm

    There is actually another AIR FriendFeed Desktop App, its called Feedalizr.com and it ws launched two days before Alert Thingy.

    Its in alpha, but i’ve talked to the developers and a new version is near completion and should be packed with goodies, so it seems to have a new twist on the whole desktop client cenario, and is worth getting acquainted with.

    Source: http://www.feedalizr.com

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