Alert Thingy Out Now
April 13, 2008
Today we are excited to finally release Alert Thingy, our FriendFeed desktop client, into the world. Since the first screen shot appeared on TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago we have been very pleased at the level of interest and anticipation in this launch. For anyone who does not know, FriendFeed is a great website that brings together personal data streams from over 30 of the most popular websites, applications and social networks into one single feed. That means your latest Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and many more activity feeds in one place. Following the release of their API we are now able to deliver that data to your desktop via Alert Thingy.
Alert Thingy was only possible through the recent release of Adobe AIR which allowed us to leverage our familiar web skills of XHTML, CSS and AJAX to develop a cross platform desktop application. We were able to get from concept to working application within 1 week and would have been able to release sooner had we not been waiting for our code signing certificate (handy hint for anyone thinking of building an AIR app, apply for your CSC today).
We would like to thank the guys on the Adobe OnAir tour for their help in developing this application and giving us the opportunity to demo at the London event. Special thanks also to Bret Taylor and the folks at FriendFeed for their advice and support. Great API guys!
If you already have a FriendFeed account then get up and running with Alert Thingy in a few minutes by visiting alertthingy.com and clicking on the install button. Otherwise visit FriendFeed.com and sign-up for an account today.
If you are interested in Adobe AIR and how it may help your business please contact us and we would be happy to discuss your requirements.
Alertthingy.com
Friendfeed.com
Adobe.com/go/air
I like how it’s all minimalist and everything, but I could use a little bit of information. How do you clear out all the alerts you’ve already seen, for example? Just wait for them to move down the page, pushed off by new things coming in?How long are they going to stick around? Can I search through them forever?
That sort of thing. Thanks.
[...] die Mehrheit der Leute, denen ich folge, nutzen diverse Desktop Tools. Mit Alert Thingy, dass heute ver
[...] Alert Thingy Out Now [...]
Congratulations on the launch of AlertThingy… it’s a very cool FriendFeed API desktop application! I suspect it will be quite a hit!!
I have some feature requests 
I’ll shoot you a DM on twitter.
@smbeebe
Thanks for the great app.
If I may, here’s my suggestion for a future release:
hide comments
Thanks.
Nice application, BUT, it doesn’t take my setting from my friendfeed profile.
It’s annoying see a page full of twitter messages, so I decided hide that stuff (on friendfed) but alerthingy is still showing it. I have the alert tab full of twitter posts. Useless.
sorry, PICNIC.
So it would be nice if alerthtingy include an option to select which services we like to get notified.
Keep up the good work !!
I love this app! But I have some feature requests too:
a. Resize.
b. Tray icon area (Windows).
c. Spanish version 
Thanks a lot anyway!
Just wondering if you might pull the color/font/transparency out into a user.css so I don’t break it when trying to customize it. My find replaces broke the JS in the html file.
Great App though.
Cheers,
Jay
[...] 5: London In terms of applications, London was very cool because we got to chat with the guys from howard/baines about AlertThingy, their FriendFeed application built on top of AIR. They released it shortly after the tour and it [...]
Thanks for the release.
Do you have anywhere you want feedback? Or shall I just bung it here?
For me, I thought some strong colour coding for the various feed types eg Twitter etc so you can learn to scan the updates list and easily notice the feed types you are most interested in.
Twitter is just about manageable with it’s update list but since FF does the lot, it would be great to have really clear colouring and logos for each feed type.
Cheers!
Please, make a volume control or reduce the alert wav volume. 2many scares!
[...] 5: London In terms of applications, London was very cool because we got to chat with the guys from howard/baines about AlertThingy, their FriendFeed application built on top of AIR. They released it shortly after the tour and it [...]
man，thingy alert is awesome . I’m happy to see these updates these days.
i’m a chinese , the chinese words still not working in thingy alert now. looking forward to your next update would work this out.
thank you for your hard working.
Hi, very nice job ! But why don’t you put direct link to the app on the website ? Cause the AIR applet installation flash code in firefox with Ubuntu OS says that Adobe AIR isn’t available for my system … so I have to download from here : http://www.howardbaines.com/alertthingy/AlertThingy.air
I would like an option to change the alert sound please, or pause notifications. I still prefer twhirl for my twittering but would prefer to use just the one app for everything.
[...] London stop of the OnAIR Tour Europe we got to see a presentation about Alert Thingy which has now launched. AlertThingy is a client for the new social feed aggregation service FriendFeed and it’s build in [...]
1.3 is great! Thank you for a great piece of software!
But why does everyone insist on using tinyurl that creates a single point of failure for the WWW links structure? Please have a look at http://www.urlb.org/mydomain/urlborg_xml.php It lets site owners define their own short domain…
If you could add grouping like it does on friendfeed site that would be great. Scoble pretty much takes over my alerts right now.