While everyone's busy watching Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and News Corp attempt to 'maybe' consolidate, and continue to innovate at the same time, another long-time web and desktop player has been moving right along with little fanfare.
It's Adobe (Can you say Flash, Dreamweaver?)...
The company hasn't just been sitting around watching during all of this web and desktop application mania.
The Adobe AIR desktop platform released last month has seen a barrage of developers using the open API to create some very neat stuff.
Techcrunch reported a while back that a Friendfeed desktop app using AIR was in the works. A couple of hours ago, while I was briefly checking Friendfeed, I noticed Arrington pumping this story.
Cool. Another desktop app.
I ran rightover and installed AlertThingy !
(Quick! Someone call Louis Gray and Scoble too - Friendfeed on steroids).
The app (as do most Adobe AIR apps) looks pretty neat so far.
As I write this, it's popping up little updates from people I follow.
Sound familiar? Pownce was probably one of the first with this type of app.
Of course Twirl (for Twitter) also uses the platform.
Here comes the really exciting part.
They run simultaneously!
Now, I'm going to write a quick script so the apps can talk to each other (and I don't have to talk to them)...
Then I'm taking my wife out to lunch ....
Update: AlertThingy released an update today (April 14). Now version 1.1