Version 2 of Alert Thingy may have just been released last month, but version 3 is here now.

V3 has been tweaked to include features that make it an excellent addition to your work desktop, including support for Basecamp, Yammer, and Huddle.

Alert Thingy also works with TwitPic and Twitter Search now, making it one of the most complete desktop Twitter clients around. Ping.fm has also been added so you can easily keep all your status and microblog sites up-to-date. Just visit ping.fm/key and paste in the resulting code.

To run Alert Thingy, you'll need to have Adobe Air installed. If you're looking for the original FriendFeed only version, it's still available from their site as well.

There's no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.

Posty's main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also select the individual tab for each service to see recent updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they're available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.

One of the only complaints we had with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there's no way to make it smaller. Bigger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.

Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Sarah in Tampa]

Because it wasn't hard enough trying to decide which Adobe AIR-based desktop Twitter/FriendFeed client to use, MySocial 24x7 had to go and complicate things by releasing their own desktop client. MySocial 24x7 started out as a Firefox sidebar add-on, but if you value your screen real estate, standalone applications are the way to go.

The desktop client lets you track and engage in Twitter and FriendFeed conversations without a web browser. One thing that sets MySocial 24x7 apart from other desktop clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy is the integrated browser that lets you view pictures and videos without launching a web browser.

The interface is clean and easy to use. But it's not very customizable. If you want to see detailed user information, or send direct Twitter messages, MySocial 24x7 might not be the desktop client for you. We also had a hard time getting the client to connect to our Twitter and FriendFeed accounts, but it did a great job of tracking public timelines.

[via TechCrunch]

When it comes to desktop alert clients for social networking feeds, there can be only one. Well, that's not really true, but when it comes right down to it, do you want to run one application to keep track of your Twitter updates, another for posting to Jaiku and Pownce, and still a third to track FriendFeed updates? Probably not, which is why Twhirl is such a nifty little application since it can now do all of those things, and support for video micro-blogging service Seesmic is coming soon.

That brings the total number of Adobe AIR-based desktop clients for accessing FriendFeed updates to at least two. The other day we told you about Alert Thingy, a new desktop client for keeping tabs on your FriendFeed information. But just as Twhirl was busy adding FriendFeed to its repertoire, Alert Thingy's developers were adding Twitter integration, which means the two applications are now fighting for the same user base.

At this point, Twhirl has a much stronger Twitter client than Alert Thingy and Alert Thingy has a much more elegant FriendFeed interface. And both applications eat up more RAM than we're really comfortable with. But development on these desktop notifier/communication clients is happening at a pretty quick pace and both tools are worth keeping an eye on.

[via TechCrunch]