FriendFeed, the highly-praised social content aggregation service just got a little cooler, with the new companion application, Alert Thingy. The program is just as charming as its name implies, and offers quick aggregation for your and all of your friends’ online activity, right to an aesthetically pleasing little window on your desktop. And since it’s built on Adobe’s Excellent AIR platform, it is cross platform, and runs without a hitch. Unfortunately, it seemed to ignore my requests for it to not play sounds, but the developer assured me that “We are looking into the issue as I speak.” In the meanwhile, I was able to kill sounds by replacing the sound file in the app’s package with a blank text file, but I’m guessing not everyone is experienced enough to do that.

AlertThingy, The FriendFeed Desktop Application, Launches: “The application allows users to see the data stream from people they follow on FriendFeed, and post new messages directly to the service. Users can also comment on posted items, and bookmark them. And possibly the best feature: it includes FriendFeed search.”