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April 17, 2008

The Twitter/FriendFeed Desktop Client Arms Race Continues

Michael Arrington

61 comments »

A lot of people are addicted to Twitter (microblogging), and a lot of people are addicted to FriendFeed (friends’ activity streams).

While both are web services, each offers an API that lets third parties build on top of them, including desktop applications. Twhirl, recently acquired by Seesmic, has emerged as the leading desktop client for Twitter, and Alert Thingy launched days ago on the newly released FriendFeed API. Both are built on the Adobe AIR platform.

Yesterday, though, the two desktop clients started to compete with each other directly when Alert Thingy added support for Twitter as well. And even though I am an investor in Twhirl, I said I may uninstall it for good once a few more features were added to Alert Thingy. There is no reason to have both installed once they overlap completely.

Today, though, Twhirl hit back by adding FriendFeed support, including the ability to search, lookup users, write comments and bookmark items. The new version, 0.7.9, is available now here and will be pushed generally to users in a few days.

Loic Le Meur (founder of Twhirl parent company Seesmic) created the video below demonstrating the new version:

Due to the conflict I won’t editorialize further on Twhirl. Users who want a desktop application for both Twitter and FriendFeed should test both applications out for themselves to decide which one is best for them. The good news for all of us: competition, even in this very niche market, is forcing rapid innovation.

Download AlertThingy here, and (the new) Twhirl here.

CrunchBase Information
Alert Thingy
Twhirl
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 12:38 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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Comments

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  1. Vero Pepperrell

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:10 am

    Does anyone get any focused no-distraction productivity out of their day anymore? In marketing, traditional interruption-based advertising is dying out but we’re bringing in the interruptions in ourselves.

    Even as a blogger, I’m tempted to have an offline day a week - no IMs, IRC, email or phone calls.

  2. bbebop

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:11 am

    why would an investor uninstall the product he’s invested in in favor of a competing product? must be a small investment or conflicts of interest dancing on the head of a pin…

  3. Abhijeet from Jeet Blog

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:13 am

    This is awesome. I love friendfeed too and I was seriously thinking about using AlertyThing. But now I will wait a few more days till I get the twhirl update so that I can have a look at my friendfeed through twhirl. And yes tweeting will always be there. :)

  4. twitterfans.com

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:17 am

    Paving the way to Desktop 2.0? :P

  5. Michael Arrington

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:22 am

    bbebop - just giving my honest feedback. I could go on about how twhirl is a tiny acquisition by a company that I made a tiny investment in, but the fact is, that doesn’t matter. See, for example:

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....ill-climb/

  6. pico

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:22 am

    now it’s getting harder to build a new business model for startups… Everything is (almost) free.. but it’s all good. :)

  7. cem

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:35 am

    FF remote key rule sucks in Twhirl…

  8. AZEEM

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:53 am

    C’mon guys. This isn’t an arms race. It’s more like a sneezng competition.
    Two highly replicable products–built in Air in a matter of weeks–which are barely products, more like features.

    Highly desirable features, no doubt.
    Enjoyable to use.

    But *IT’S NO ARMS RACE*.

  9. Wayne Schulz

    April 17th, 2008 at 2:54 am

    I don’t get the new Twhirl/Friendfeed integration. It seems I have to keep two apps open on my desktop.

    How soon before I lose my desktop entirely to gadgets.

    Couldn’t they have integrated the Friendfeed data into the main Twhirl screen?

    Neither of these really Friendfeed readers are holding my interest — probably because FF is already pretty good via the web interface.

  10. Roald Cyberath

    April 17th, 2008 at 3:12 am

    Wow. When Loic’s video came to display a link on his FriendFeed, and we could see that it was a TechCrunch post by Michael, I almost expected the title of the post to be this very article… THAT would have been a conflict of interest (or magic) (or bizarre, twilightzone-sque).

    Other than that, I agree with #1 Vero’s comment: we thought we were coming to a “connected life”, while in fact we might well be doomed to an “interrupted life”.

  11. Alex

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:12 am

    #1 true, productivity going way down lately…

  12. More Options

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:29 am

    I’ve been quite happy with Digsby myself. IM, email, social networks, and twitter, all from one happy, fat little guy that sits in my taskbar.

  13. alan p

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:40 am

    Naaah…the killer app is a reverse aggregator that puts the conversation back on the blogs ;-)

    My thoughts on this shakeout here:

    http://broadstuff.com/archives.....230;..html

  14. omer

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:47 am

    what a buzz

  15. Matt Brian

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:50 am

    Digsby is a good app, I’ve got many people to convert from Pidgin to their application. FriendFeed support is a distinct possibility.

    I do, however, wonder how long it will stay free.

  16. felder

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:50 am

    what a buzz around these

  17. Philip Buxton

    April 17th, 2008 at 4:54 am

    just downloaded Digsby based on that comment. It already looks a cracking app.

  18. Roam

    April 17th, 2008 at 6:01 am

    A simple yet innovative idea.

    I like this

  19. quirkyalone

    April 17th, 2008 at 6:30 am

    Am I the only one dislikeing the AIR look&feel? Could someone please create standard win app?

  20. Josh Moles

    April 17th, 2008 at 7:21 am

    #12 I agree completely. I think Twhril looks neat, but Digsby seems to do everything I need it to do for me. Besides, it is nice only having to run one application to do all the communication.

  21. engtech

    April 17th, 2008 at 7:45 am

    Both clients add ‘via alert thingy’ and ‘via twhirl’ to any comment you make on Friend Feed.

    Hopefully Friend Feed will add official support for a source parameter in the API so spamming like this isn’t necessary.

    In the meantime, you can use this greasemonkey script to change all those via messages to say “in bed”. It gets pretty funny sometimes.

    http://idt-labs.blogspot.com/2.....o-bed.html

  22. Raskin

    April 17th, 2008 at 7:50 am

    Arms race? I mean, I guess … more like “hermit crab race” or “pet turtle race at the senior home” or “retired greyhound race to the slaughterhouse type of race” … or some other type of not so sensational, not really that important type of race kind of race.

  23. lol @ silly people

    April 17th, 2008 at 7:55 am

    Way to miss the boat guys - most people have no clue what Twitter and Friendfeed are. Even most tech folks who have tried them out are like “so what”? Seriously, so what? This is like reporting about two guys having a farting contest. Intriguing to those who like to smell their own farts (Twitter users for sure).

  24. desktop era dead

    April 17th, 2008 at 10:13 am

    Wow. Way to waste your money Arrington. Did somebody actually say “desktop 2.0″? Not only is the twit/feed audience insignificantly small, but the entire notion of a desktop “arms race” is an absolute joke. Haven’t we learned anything in the last 5 years. The killer desktop client is YOUR WEB BROWSER. What’s next, shareware 2.0?

  25. dmg

    April 17th, 2008 at 10:52 am

    Is this shit really going to monetize? Has IM ever made money? No.

  26. keith

    April 17th, 2008 at 11:05 am

    “The Twitter/FriendFeed Desktop Client Arms Race Continues”

    and the rest of the world continues to not hear the silicon valley echo chamber

  27. Sean

    April 17th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    I have been using Digsby to deal with Facebook, MySpace & Twitter feeds and I am loving it so far.

  28. Anthony Perez

    April 17th, 2008 at 10:33 pm

    I’m a big tech guy and I’ve played with all of these apps and services…and I just don’t care. I’m 21, into tech and the internet big time, I have a lot of web geek friends, and I just don’t get these services. I gain very little if anything from them.

  29. Otavio Ferreira

    April 18th, 2008 at 11:43 am

    What about Feedalizr? I heard about it before Alert Thingy, and have had a great experience there! It seems that new exciting features are coming… Let’s wait and see!

  30. Joe Lichtenberg

    May 2nd, 2008 at 8:41 am

    The enthusiasm for FriendFeed now seems to be extending to desktop clients built specifically to expose FriendFeed data as soon as it gets published, so as not to incur even the slightest delay watching the real-time chatter :-)

    How real-time do people want this data to be?

    Since one of the (many) things that Eluma does is to expose feeds as desktop alerts, I thought I would see how Eluma stacks up as a client for FriendFeed, and see if I liked the experience getting immediate notification all day long from my FriendFeed feeds.

    If you watch the video, you will notice that there was no API integration required - just out of the box functionality for exposing FriendFeed feeds as alerts.

    I posted a short video here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWjpUxWuPP8

    Joe.

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