Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application that takes the content from your FriendFeed account and brings it offline to your desktop. Are you asking “what’s Friendfeed?” Keep reading for the scoop.

I’ve been using Friendfeed for about three weeks. It’s a much hyped online web site that seems to be primarily used by bloggers to keep track of what their blogger friends (and groupies) are writing and talking about.

I like to use it as a quick way to see what other people are bookmarking as interesting stories in Google Reader or writing about in their blogs. For me Friendfeed is very much like an RSS reader for social networking sites. It is useful primarily if you have friends who you want to stay up to date with.

If there’s a fatal flaw in FriendFeed (and social networking as a whole) it’s that the service(s) are only useful to the extent that your friends use them.

In my opinion it remains to be seen whether people are going to continue using a lot of these social networking sites once the fad wears off (and yes I do think many of them are quite faddish).

The Friendfeed service (which I’m sure will spawn several dozen VC funded imitators rather quickly) exists as a way to consolidate your different social network sites into one place.

For example:

Let’s use my online activity as an example.

I have a Flickr account, Google Reader, YouTube, Blog Posts at Geardiary, and Twitter account.

With Friendfeed, all of my activity is consolidated so that my friends can have one central point to see what I’m posting about.

The site saves them from having to visit numerous online services just to find out if I’ve

Uploaded new pictures from my trip to Cirque du Soleil last night to my Flickr account.

Posted that exciting YouTube video of my daughter’s first ski trip down the hill at the Ridin Hy Dude Ranch

Or if my friends want to see any of my Twitter messages.

Friendfeed also makes it easy to see what I’ve shared from my Google Reader account.
Anything that I’ve blogged shows up here too.

Friendfeed gathers information from the following social networking sites:

* Amazon.com
* Blog
* del.icio.us
* Digg
* Disqus
* Flickr
* Furl
* Gmail/Google Talk
* Goodreads
* Google Reader
* Google Shared Stuff
* iLike
* Jaiku
* Last.fm
* LibraryThing
* LinkedIn
* Ma.gnolia
* Mixx
* Netflix
* Netvibes
* Pandora
* Picasa Web Albums
* Pownce
* Reddit
* Seesmic
* SlideShare
* SmugMug
* StumbleUpon
* Tumblr
* Twitter
* Upcoming
* Vimeo
* Yelp
* YouTube
* Zooomr

Still have questions about Friendfeed? They have a pretty complete list of Frequently Asked Questions that you can browse - here.

Now that you know about Friendfeed and how it operates, here’s a little more about Alert Thingy.

Because Alert Thingy is written using the Adobe Air platform, you can use this on either Windows, Linux or a Mac. It requires installation of the Adobe Air platform (free) which the install routine does for you automatically.

The program then allows you to:

- View the activity of your FriendFeed account without having to log into the site
- Post items to your FriendFeed account without logging onto the site
- Get alerts when your friends post new items

Unfortunately in its present form this is a pretty program that hasn’t done much else for me. I still need to be connected to the Internet to get the most out of this because tasks that I can do online such as clicking a friend’s post and then making a comment cannot be done from AlertThingy. Update: My Bad - you must obtain a free Remote Key from the Friendfeed site in order to be able to post comments and interact with Friendfeed from Alert Thingy. Once I added my key (see image below) I was able to post comments and otherwise interact normally with Friendfeed from my desktop.

When I click on most friend postings I’m still taken online quite often instead of being able to view further information within AlterThingy.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about this program in the future. For now, most of my work will continue to be done within FriendFeed’s web interface. If more functions like commenting are added to the program I’ll take another look.

Link: AlertThingy v1.0

What I Liked:

-Use of Adobe Air makes this useable on Windows, Linux and Mac computers
-Smooth interface
-Desktop alerts when friends post new items

What Needs Improvement:

-Useful things like making comments still requires a trip online
-Desktop alerts are nice - but if you have a lot of friends you may go crazy with the constant notifications.
-This isn’t an AlertThingy issue as much as my overall problem with FriendFeed. The service is SO hyped by online blog sites that I have great difficulty deciding whether a service like FriendFeed has “legs” beyond hardcore onliners such as bloggers. I cannot yet decide whether FriendFeed (and it’s derivatives) will be helpful to ordinary users like my Mom and Sister.