Monitor your Friendfeed with AlertThingy

If you’re heavily addicted to Friendfeed, you will be interested in the Adobe AIR application which has just come out called Alertthingy. It shows promise and I quite like it but it’s not yet showing the major mojo needed to tear me away from my RSS reader.

Alertthingy is benefiting at the moment from a big wave of online hype and anticipation which has been surrounding the project for ages. The application, which sits on your desktop, basically acts like a miniature RSS reader and provides you with all the updates left by your Friendfeed contacts. It’s fast and works quite well.

But since it has just come out, it is a bit on the spartan side. Plus there are quite a few other negatives (in my opinion) -

You can’t change the colours or the fonts. The dark background with the small font makes it difficult to read the updates if you have bad eyesight like I do.

There’s no option to have the application “on top” of all other windows (which makes it hard to monitor the app if you’re surfing the net).

It also appears to be quite buggy - for example, I disabled the sounds several times but the sounds kept coming.

There’s no option to disable the notification windows. It also alerts you to your OWN updates with no option to opt out. What’s the point of being notified of something you just wrote yourself?

You also have problems re-sizing the box. You can pull the box OUT easily enough but you can only push the box IN a certain way before it jams. People with limited screen space will find this deeply irritating.

But to be fair, it’s early days and will probably improve in the near future. In the meantime, I am keeping up to date with my Friendfeed updates by subscribing to the RSS feed and running it through Google Reader. I find it easier to read it that way - and the search function - being Google - is much better.

What do you think of Alertthingy? Impressed? Deflated? Indifferent?

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Visit his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

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