The new changes
- Individual user’s streams can now be displayed on separate tabs, meaning you can specifically follow any user in a tab (handy for when FF gets busy)
- Filters adapt to display information relevant to the current tab, for example you can filter via user as well
- Tabs are refreshed when the main page is refreshed.
- Tabs display the 30 most recent posts for a user.
- Flickr integration has been extended to allow taking snapshots with a webcam, and posting directly to flickr.

Also added since I last wrote about the app is built in support for the Google owned short message service Jaiku. Another thing I hadn’t noticed before was mouse over profile support on FriendFeed streams, so you can get links to each users blogs/ streams all from in the Feedalizer app. It even lists the users each person is subscribed to.

I’ve been playing with the release now for some time and I remain just as impressed with Feedalizer as I did when I first reviewed it, but now it has become even more handy. The Feedalizer team have combined good looks with a growing swiss army knife range of features. In built video recording, direct to Flickr photo taking, built in Jaiku support and support for posting to Twitter…it’s all there.

My gripes with Feedalizer are as they were before: the app is still a little fat in terms of width, and I’d like to be able to shrink it down. There’s still no inline support for Twitter, although with support for tabs you’d think that Twitter would be at least easier to implement. Even if you could say pull Twitter out of FriendFeed into a tab…something that would offer that sort of convenience. Overall though, it’s heading in the right direction and is already an appealing package. I don’t have the exact date for this release, but expect to see it in the next couple of weeks. When I find out the date I’ll let people know either here or on FriendFeed.

Related posts:

1. Move Over Twhirl, Alert Thingy, Feedalizr Is In Town
2. My FriendFeed Wishlist
3. Desktop Twitter/FriendFeed Clients Reviewed

I’ve touched previously on some of my thoughts as to the features FriendFeed could add, but here’s my entire wish list. These aren’t exclusively actionable by FriendFeed themselves so includes items that relate to the way 3rd parties interact with FriendFeed as well.

Custom Tabs

I imported all my Twitter contacts into FriendFeed the other day and ever since I’ve been a little swamped by Twitter comments as opposed to other streams in the FriendFeed collective. One person suggested that I should filter all Tweets out, but I have no desire to do so because unlike Twitter FriendFeed gives me a reliable archive of Tweets, and it’s a decent Twitter client as well.

My proposal is custom tabs. A FriendFeed user could decide to filter exclusively or for sorting purposes various inputs. In my case I could say I want all Tweets to go into an exclusive tab but they are excluded from my main friends tab. This way I can switch across to tweets whenever I wanted to. Perhaps a separate option might place Tweets back in my main Friends tab only when there is a FriendFeed discussion underneath each Tweet (as is often the case).

But lets extend the idea further: a user could set up tabs for any content, say every Digg from their friends, Tumblr entry, or combination’s there-in, and this could be exclusive to the tab or inclusive, serving as a content filter if you like.

Take it another step further: custom word searches (not unlike Google News alerts) based on tabs. Say I wanted a vanity search based on anyone mentioning me on FriendFeed, or if I was a company monitoring FriendFeed mentions. The search facility is already there, it could easily be extended to a custom tab.

Disqus FriendFeed Integration

This is a topic that has been discussed extensively over the last 24-48 hours and I think it’s a great idea. I’m already using Glenn Slaven’s excellent WordPress FriendFeed plugin here at The Inquisitr, but imagine a world where Disqus and FriendFeed comments are one instead of two separate comment threads. Lets hope this happens.

A better integrated Twitter/ FriendFeed client

I’ve written about the various clients in this space twice recently, but I still find myself unhappy with the various offerings. I’ve switched back to using Twhirl after some time using MySocial’s AIR client. I find myself using FriendFeed primarily via the website because the Twhirl FriendFeed experience is awful…I’ll be typing then lose everything I’ve written, it looks and feels clunky. And yet, Twhirl has the most features both for FriendFeed but more importantly for Twitter. There are better looking clients, but for some strange reason great aesthetics seems to equate with feature fail in the emerging FriendFeed client space. I want something that looks like and is as easy to use as Feedalizer or MySocial but is easily sizable (Feedalizer is fat) and has the depth of features that Twhirl has.

Twitter killing/ short message service

I’ve written about this previously, and people seemed to think that I was saying that FriendFeed will kill Twitter. What I said is that FriendFeed should kill Twitter, and that they are the best placed to do so, however I did not say that what they are doing at the moment is in any way, shape or form a Twitter killer.

If FriendFeed offered a short message service built on top of their current platform (call it FF messages or something), that was offered to users as part of their FriendFeed experience, or as another tab (similar to the custom tab proposal above), with the ability for 3rd party clients to use the API to offer desktop or mobile solutions that only focused on that feature, we have a Twitter killer. The ONLY reason Twitter has maintained its position today is community, something that Pownce and Jaiku never had, despite both (arguably) having better platforms. And lets face it, Twitter didn’t get to where it was today due to its ability to deliver a reliable service. FriendFeed already has the community with a lot of cross-over with Twitter, and many Twitter users would happily dump Twitter for another product if they knew that the alternative already included most, if not all of their existing contacts/ community. It’s a market and space that is ripe for the taking.

Start Page/ Widgets

This idea is a little out of left field, but I’ve been spending a bit of time on Netvibes lately and it seems to struggle in my mind as a standalone idea (at least for me). If we could do custom tabs, perhaps FriendFeed could start offering a start page service complete with support for widgets. Imagine being able to flick between FriendFeed tabs where one of those tabs offers an iGoogle feature set? The tech isn’t that hard (I’ve actually looked at buying a $399 script that does this sort of site off the shelf) and the widgets themselves use the open standard championed by Netvibes. It would be a nice value add for FriendFeed that could easily find favor.

If you could add things to FriendFeed, what would they be?

No related posts.

Feedalizr at its core is a simple to use, clean and beautiful FriendFeed application. Setup is easy, and users immediately get access to the latest from their FriendFeed. Filtering is available from the top of the app, and users can also send Twitter messages as well. Where Feedalizr excels is built in support for posting to Flickr and posting video; it wasn’t clear where the video was stored but it would appear to be a service specifically for Feedalizer users.

There are some areas needing improvement. The application is fat (wide) and takes up to much screen space for my liking. Support for Twitter posting is built in but not Twitter reading (although many will read Twitter via FriendFeed anyway). Customization is non-existent to the point that I couldn’t work out how to get the mic working when trying to record a video; it may just have been me, but there’s no setting option aside from a box to enter your FriendFeed details.

If you’re using FriendFeed and don’t have much of a need for a Twitter client, Feedalizr is most definitely worth a look. It’s still an alpha release so we’d expect to see improved features in the future, but this app is going to win users now based on looks alone in a similar way Twitterific won the hearts and minds early on of Twitter users.

Related posts:

1. First Look at Feedalizr 1.1.4
2. Twhirl Gets a Fresh Coat of Paint
3. New Twhirl Preview Release Adds Seesmic Recording, Ping.fm Support

The review doesn’t include every desktop app, only ones that run on a Mac (although I know of only one non-Mac desktop client). Strangely all three are Adobe AIR apps (no Cocoa or similar Mac only app) so all three offer cross platform support.

Twhirl

For: mature Twitter client, highly customizable, one click support for Twitter subpages
Against: renders FriendFeed and Twitter is seperate windows, ugly as sin

Twhirl was one of the first wave of Twitter AIR clients launched in 2007. The app has alway defined itself as providing extra support and when acquired by Loic LeMeur’s Seesmic in April it held the position of most popular Twitter client alongside Mac favorite Twitteriffic. Weeks later the service added support for FriendFeed.

I’d switched to Twhirl a couple of months back (from Twitteriffic) for use with Twitter, and I cant speak highly enough about the feature set, yet there are two aspects that were lacking when I tried to use it as a FriendFeed client as well. The biggest drawback is its insistence that the FriendFeed is rendered in a separate window; this may sound strange to some but even with my twin 22″ monitors, I don’t want more desktop clutter. The simple solution is for Twhirl to offer FriendFeed in tabs within the one window. The second issue is that Twhirl is simply ugly, and it doesn’t make for a appealing user experience. The looks can be customized (and I have), but I found it harder to look pass the ugliness with FriendFeed updates than I did with Twitter.

Alert Thingy

For: strong FriendFeed support, mergers Twitter + FriendFeed feeds and natively gets rid of duplicated tweets
Against: lacks avatar support, lacks depth of Twitter functionality

Alert Thingy was the first FriendFeed desktop app and has grown since. The service offers a combined Twitter/ FriendFeed feed that blocks duplicates so you’re not suffering the same Twitter messages twice.

This is a service that deserves love; it’s simple, clean and functional, even if it does lack many of the Twitter features provided by Twhirl. The big negative for a first time user: zero support for avatars. When I use Twitter I look at avatar pictures and I expect them to be there. They aren’t in Alert Thingy. The service also lacks any serious ability to customize how it works, aside from being able to change the color theme.

MySocial AIR

For: Simple, splits streams into tabs, supports video and picture viewing inline
Against: alpha release so occasionally buggy).

MySocial is the newest Twitter/FriendFeed desktop app on the block, although MySocial has previously released a Firefox sidebar addon that offers similar functionality.

Out of the box it’s clean and appealing. Unlike Alert Thingy it supports avatars and the rendering of threads on FriendFeed is visually the best of the three clients our of the box. The downside: like Alert Thingy it lacks many of the additional Twitter functions offered by Twhirl, and as it’s an alpha release it’s still occasionally buggy. It has never crashed for me, but every now and then it does strange things with avatar rendering.

Conclusion
I can see myself using any of these clients in the future, but for now I’ve decided on MySocial, despite the occasional bug. Looks may not be everything, but I don’t want to be straining to read a FriendFeed entry delivered by Twhirl in another window, or look at the blandness of the avatar free Alert Thingy. My bet is we will see better releases from all three in the coming months and I’ll have to revisit this review, but for now MySocial is sitting nicely on my desktop.

Related posts:

1. My FriendFeed Wishlist
2. Move Over Twhirl, Alert Thingy, Feedalizr Is In Town
3. Twitter desktop client Seesmic Desktop is worth another look