• by frank , June 21, 2009

In my last blog post, part one of three of how I’m keeping in contact with my friends this summer, I discussed my usage of the chat aggregator Digsby. In this second installment, I’m going to teach you all about another gift from the internet gods: Alert Thingy.

If you’re anything like me, you likely aren’t a fan of the new Twitter style Facebook feed. Especially if you have 1100+ friends like I do. Besides having to sort through all those quizzes, wall posts and photo tags, I hate having to go to several different sites to keep updated on my close friends. Since my discovery of Alert Thingy, life has become somewhat easier.

First off, like all good things on the internet, AlertThingy is free. Now, onto what it is: AlertThingy combines updates from your favorite social network sites as well as posting abilities to those sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Ping.fm and TwitPic, right on your desktop. Plans for adding Myspace are in the works. In addition, it works with Basecamp, Huddle and Yammer, which are great resources for businesses and project managers. It even has a TinyURL link shortener built into it.

Besides aggregating updates and posting abilities to one app, AlertThingy allows you to have several lists. In one pane, you can have every update from every one of your friends across those different networking sites while in another pane, have only updates directed towards you.

However, my favorite part about AlertThingy is the “Very Interesting” list that is built into the application. This list allows me to select out of my 1100 Facebook friends and 150 Twitter friends (the only two social networking sites I use AlertThingy for) only the people I truly wish to keep updated on. While I know in one way or another everyone I’m friends with on social networking sites, there are only a select number I wish to have constant updates on. So instead of sifting through 1250+ people’s updates, I now only have to look at about a tenth of that.

By using AlertThingy, I combine the functionality of 9 different tabs in my browser in one single tiny buddy list. While it isn’t as many as the 16 tabs saved by Digsby, AlertThingy gives better customizing options, which I feel is more valuable. Additionally, Digsby only gives a random selection of updates in its Facebook section (like how old Facebook used to do it). If I am focusing on only a smaller number of people to stay connected to, then I want to know everything, not just every 5th item.

So, if you’re tired of sifting through endless tweets and Facebook posts, I would highly recommend giving AlertThingy a try. I do suspect given its small number of users (10k-20k new users a month) that there is a better option out there, but so far I haven’t found one.