That was fast! Google Wave's barely been available for a week, and there's already a Google Wave Notifier extension for Firefox. The notifier sits in your status bar and shows the number of waves with unread messages in your inbox (not the total number of unread messages, mind you). It's small, unobtrusive, and checks for messages at an adjustable interval.

Of course, you can also manually refresh the notifier. Double-clicking it will take you to Wave, so you can deal with those unread messages. It's a pretty basic extension, but it's the first one out of the gate, and Google hasn't released anything official with similar functionality.

Sometimes it seems that we're so plugged in to Twitter here @downloadsquad -- rather, at Download Squad -- that we don't even know FriendFeed exists.

Not true! In fact, I noticed that FriendFeed just released an official desktop notifier, built on Adobe AIR. It's pretty rough so far, but a lot of users are commenting with feature requests and improvements.

The main issue people have with the notifier so far is that it's a bit overwhelming. Right now, it just displays a pop-up for every new item in your feed. Useful, sure, but that can be a lot of items. Without customization settings to narrow down what you're seeing -- or slim down the size of the pop-up -- it's very obtrusive.

You also have to click through to take certain actions (like responding to comments) in a browser window, even though it looks like you should be able to do it right in the notifier. Despite these little annoyances, the desktop notifier is a good first step, and seems likely to improve in the near future.

Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls.

There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, including:

• A fix for "connection lost" issue when logging in
• A fix for MSN Messenger IMs not being sent
• A fix for Digsby getting stuck while loading skins during the login
• A fix for freezes while logging into Yahoo! Messenger
• Ctrl + Backapsace now deletes one word at a time in the input box

If you already have a Digsby account, you can either download the latest client from the Digsby home page or just fire up Digsby on your PC if it's already installed. The client will download all the updates automatically. While the lack of proxy support was one of the main complaints we heard from users last week, there's one other issue we'd love to see Digsby work on: The program's large memory footprint. Digsby can easily use 70MB or more at launch. Considering how many functions the service has, that might not seem like a lot, but similar applications like Pidgin use just a small fraction of the RAM that Digsby does.

E-mail notifiers are great if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to keep a lot of unread messages in your inbox. But unless you only subscribe to a handful of RSS feeds, we're not convinced that an RSS notifier is anywhere near as useful. That's because we've never met anybody who manages to actually keep up with their RSS feeds. And what use is a notifier that constantly reminds you that there are thousands of unread items awaiting you?

Well, it turns out, Google Reader Notifier actually can be kind of useful. That's because you can set it to monitor items with a particular label. So if you've got one label for general news, another for technology news, and another for silly pictures of cats, you can just check out the unread cat photos every day. We're big advocates of setting low goals to avoid disappointment.

Unfortunately, there's no way to select multiple labels. If you'd rather have your notifier as a browser plugin, check out the Google Reader Notifier add-on for Firefox.

[via gHacks]

I don't know about you, but I have quite a few Firefox extensions. Every once in a while I would have to go into the add-on menu and hit that update button and then restart Firefox if there were any new updates. This "every once in a while" was not a routine check. I really just did it when I installed a new extension. Leaving me blind to any possible updates that could make my extensions run better, or even new features. All of this is taken care of with Update Notifier.

I can foresee the comments now: "Lazy!" or "Just use the built-in update feature". I know, I know, this may seem like a copy of the way Firefox does things, but this is actually a very helpful, and more customizable extension. So why not just let Firefox check the Mozilla add-on site for any updates? Because of the customizations that you can do with this extension. The most useful feature to some of you out there is that you are able to customize when and how often Firefox checks for updates. You can have it check for updates each time Firefox opens and/or every 6/12/24/48 hours. So, instead of adding time to Firefox's startup, it can check while you are browsing (just be sure to disable Firefox's auto update feature: Tools > Options > Advanced > Update and uncheck everything). Then, another features of Update Notifier is that you can have a prompt pop up and ask you if you would like to restart Firefox or not. Which will give you the option of using the new updated features of your extension as soon as possible.

Also, I can't keep on top of all of the Firefox add-ons out there. I need your help! Please shoot me your suggestions to other great Firefox add-ons in the comments below. Be sure to leave your website/blog info for a link-back if your suggestion makes it to the Download Squad's main page!

Google has always been a little slow at developing its applications for Mac users. Google Calendar and Gmail Notifier for the Mac platform have always had performance issues, especially in Safari. But not anymore.

The Google Blog has just informed us that the Mac Team has been working on creating better user experiences for Mac users, and have just released better Safari support for Google Calendar, and a Mac upgrade for the Gmail Notifier. Calendar now works perfectly with Safari, and Notifier now has notifications for upcoming events and unread mail, as well as new icons and custom sounds.

Looks like there could be a little buggy hanging out in Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. IE issues some kind of warning when another application tries to change the default search engine settings, and Google Toolbar Notifier looks to be the culprit. Apparently, this little application runs even when it has been disabled or shutoff says Ionut Alex.

Google is busy working on a fix for this issue at the moment, since they were only made aware of the problem recently.