Twirl Versus Alert Thingy

April 22, 2008

The new media douchebags of the world have been excited about services like Twitter for a while now. When FriendFeed came out, the excitement went into full orgasmic response.

But, of course, both of these services are YET another website to go to. FriendFeed is nice because it consolidates your activity from many other sites into one feed, but if you are following others on FriendFeed, the problem remains: you have to GO to the website to see what people are saying.

More noise. More hassle.

I’ve been using the Twhirl client for awhile to work with Twitter. Twhirl, so far, is the best Twitter client I have found. Every now and then, it is a bit wonky. But, it works. I had tried another one before and the problem is that it would crash and burn after being online a few hours. Twhirl manages to keep on working after days.

What is good about Twhirl?

It can work with multiple Twitter accounts
It puts notifications of new tweets on screen (including audio notification if you like)
It allows you to search Twitter
It has built-in URL shortening
You can cross-post to Pownce or Jaiku (I haven’t tried this one yet)
Nice interface

Now, Alert Thingy is much newer to the scene and it immediately drew attention because it worked with FriendFeed (this feature is coming in Twhirl). I went to install Alert Thingy and was greeted with the fact that my Flash player is out of date - even though I’m running version 9. Apparently, the install button requires practically the most recent release of Flash player. Annoying, but I had to go and update the player, come back and install. From there is worked fine (Adobe Air is cool like that).

I find the interface design in Alert Thingy to actually be a little better. I like the larger fonts and the interface is snappy. But, Alert Thingy is not as functional as Twhirl at this point. What it does (FriendFeed) it does well. But, it doesn’t allow you to follow Twitter. You can send tweets in Alert Thingy, but not follow your Twitter friends. You can only follow your FriendFeed friends.

Despite the limitations, the client will go a long way to actually help me keep tabs on FriendFeed - a service I really like but don’t check much because I actually have to GO there.

Wondering where Twhirl might be going with FriendFeed, I decided to check out their preview release. They have a link to 0.7.9 on the home page saying it supports FriendFeed. Weird thing is that when I installed it, I didn’t see anything at all that even mentions FriendFeed. The feature seems to be completely MIA. Am I missing something?

For now, it is two different clients: Alert Thingy for FriendFeed and Twhirl for Twitter. If Alert Thingy would provide the ability to somehow separately monitor Twitter follows, it would be a killer app. I know you can follow Twitter through FriendFeed, but I have a lot of people I follow only on Twitter and not on FriendFeed. Would be nice to have an all-in-one client.

We’ll get there.