Filed under: Web services, Social Software
Alert Thingy: FriendFeed on your desktop
FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much every social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend's blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you've been looking for a faster way to read updates, you're in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and allow you post items directly to FriendFeed.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
