This latest update, due out later today available now, sees the launch of "groups," putting the service in direct competition with the most popular desktop client for Twitter: TweetDeck. Where AlertThingy surpasses its competition, though, is in its integration of multiple social networks, the most significant of which are Facebook, Flickr, and Digg.

Although TweetDeck's recent update integrates a column with a stream of your Facebook friends' updates, with AlertThingy you can create multiple groups of friends from multiple networks. Once you get your head around it, the grouping of friends works surprisingly well. But unfortunately, it does currently have one major drawback (mainly for Twitter users, who tend to follow many people), which we'll address below.

This release of AlertThingy does unleash one particularly outstanding feature: deep search. AlertThingy's search capabilities allow you to use whatever search terms you like across all your groups, feeds, and networks, remarkably fast.

Limitations

Given TweetDeck's phenomenal rise to success and recent feature developments, any desktop alert-oriented application will have to face comparison, particularly if it incorporates groups.

Aside from a few minor bugs and time lags in switching views, we were frustrated by two things in particular with AlertThingy:

1. It is not efficient in creating groups for Twitter users who follow more than 1000 people. Although you can receive updates from everyone as normal, you aren't able to receive the full list of Twitter contacts as you would with TweetDeck.
2. In terms of usability, figuring out how to view Twitter replies and direct messages took far too long. Learning which view to select to create groups was also frustrating. And adding one's various networks and RSS feeds felt needlessly complex.

That said, after some time getting to grips with the application, we have many nice things to say about the social networking client. The UI in and of itself is clean and easy on the eye; the process of merging friends from various networks into a single group is superb; and, once understood, the various viewing options are a solid, worthwhile feature.

When all is said and done, however, devoted TweetDeck users, who account for approximately 13% of all Twitter users, would likely miss the overall slickness of the leading Twitter client. Among the features noticeably missing from AlertyThingy are the ability to modify theming options, to move columns left and right, to receive separate notifications for separate groups, and to view user profiles within the application.

Conclusion

AlertThingy is unquestionably a strong player in the Twitter and social network client market. With its impressive feature set and clear direction, AlertThingy certainly has potential. If it focuses on usability, flushes out bugs, adds a couple of missing features, and works on configuration for groups, it could overtake other applications, including TweetDeck, in the not-too-distant future.

Web Apps

The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg

If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

Is it time to accept that Digg is no longer an equivalent to Slashdot, and that it is as much a mainstream news site as say BusinessWeek or People magazine?

SixApart's BlogIt Could Be the Start of Something Big

SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad this week, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.

The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. This post lists a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.

Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service

Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August, this week launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark's huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.

When we reviewed Grooveshark last August, we called it "one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store." With the addition of Grooveshark Lite, the service is now also one part Pandora.

Battle of the AIR Apps: Twhirl vs. Alert Thingy

The battle between the two most popular AIR apps has begun. Earlier this week FriendFeed AIR app Alert Thingy, having only just launched on April 13th, was already getting an update - this one to include Twitter support via a built-in "Tweet" button. Not to be outdone, Twhirl wasted no time in providing an update of their own, seemingly crafting their updated version overnight. Now Twhirl includes FriendFeed support and Alert Thingy does Twitter, but are either of them really giving users what they want?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes

Former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced this week that he's calling it quits for his company Mowser, because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse. "The mobile traffic just isn't there," Beattie says, "It's not there now, and it won't be."

Beattie's announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP. "The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices," Mace wrote.

Be sure to check the comments of this post, there were some excellent counterpoints made on both sides of the argument.

Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media

Let's be honest here: we're all a bunch of social media addicts. We're junkies. Whether it's a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we're all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don't have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?

Where's Our Real World Data Portability?

In a recent Slashdot thread, someone sought advice on an electronic cash register set up that would output sales data in an open format. While the asker was looking for information from the point of view of a shop owner, it got us thinking about data portability. There's been a lot of clamor over the past few months about who owns attention data and a major online movement has started with the aim of pushing companies into granting access to that data to the users who create it. But what about offline attention data? Should we demand access to that as well?

13 Seed Funding Options For Entrepreneurs

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. This post lists 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

However, we have to question whether either app is delivering users what they really want or if they are both just caught up in one-upping each other on features.

Yesterday's announcement of Alert Thingy's "Twitter support," for example, simply added a button that allowed you to tweet from the app, but the ability to reply via Twitter was still not present.

Meanwhile, today's Twhirl update - so new that it doesn't even come via the automatic update feature - introduces FriendFeed support, which displays in a separate window, essentially making it feel like you're running two applications anyway.

What neither app does is include all the features people want - a combined interface with the optional ability to pop-out into separate windows, replies via Twitter, and, of course, the duplication of FriendFeed's feature set in AIR form, such as the ability to do things like push "likes" to the top and display additional comments within the app.

Despite the rapid inclusion of new features and overnight updates, it appears that instead of pleasing fans, some people are actually becoming somewhat concerned. Take, for example, the comments on FriendFeed surrounding the update (from here and here):

• "I share your concerns about horses for courses and the fact that these tools may split and having done one thing very well, may end up doing many things poorly" - Andy C
• "With the latest reverse development, now it's chaos!" - Charlie Anzman
• "Urgh, 0.7.9 is really buggy. I'm going back to the current stable version." - Voyagerfan5761
• "AlertThingy and Twhirl are both driving me batty."  - Carla Thompson
• "Two windows definitely not working for me...needs consolidation and twitter posting ability. ...via twhirl" - Adam Deyong
• "o great, now i've got two windows showing the same twitters... ...via twhirl" - Samuel Bostock
• "Why two windows? Can't they integrate to one UI? ...via twhirl" - Wayne Schulz

While it's entirely possible that future releases of one or both of the clients will do away with the inconveniences that are apparent now, we wonder if users would not be better served by slower to appear, major releases that include all the requested features instead of having to deal with the hassle of incremental, unfulfilling updates on an extremely fast-paced schedule.