If following conversations in the blogo/social media/o-sphere is important to you / is your thang, then its time to rejoice, because AlertThingy is here.  Running as an Adobe AIR application, this desktop application (unlike the other Friendfeed app which needed you to install the NET Framework) is quick and snappy, and just like your favorite Twittering desk top application, runs quietly in the background picking up Friendfeed updates automatically.

One of the great things about things like Twhirl or Snitter (my Twitter client of choice) is that you never have to press the refresh button (in your browser); they just automatically update with the conversation stream that are your “friends”. EDIT apparently it updates automatically in browser.  Guess I’ve never been patient enough to discover that! thanks @engtech}

Other things that AlertThingy does well:

• Mimics almost all Friendfeed functions
• Has another wise smallish footprint
• Has a box to search for things (people, content, etc) — (although it doesn’t always highlight the search term in the results)
• Did I mention that its snappy?

Now that I have both Snitter and AlertThingy running, you might wonder why you would go with your favourite Twitter application at all.  Well, not quite (although I’m sure this is something they’ll fix).  Friendfeed, the web application (in your browser) has the ability to send back *to* Twitter folks using the “@”pre-fix.

As far as I can tell, AlertThingy has yet to replicate this specific function; therefore, you’ll be able to listen and “hear” tweets.  But you won’t be able to reply back to them *through* Twitter, although this is an admittedly a very new function.

That, and there isn’t an easy way to reconcile my Twitter and Friendfeed accounts.  I have different people on each, and I can only forsee the gargantuan undertaking it would be to manually copy them over (which is so primitive I can scarcely believe I typed it) — so believe me, I won’t.

At any rate, my feeling is that most people are still enamoured with Twitter, and they may find themselves in my shoes (Twitter crowd > Friendfeed crowd; Listen and not communicate back to Twitterati).  And if that’s the case, I’ll be the first in line eagerly waiting for AlertThingy 1.1, although in its own right AlertThingy rocks as well.