Alert Thingy is on its way to becoming the dream social networking desktop client that all of us have hoped to have. It allows you to get Twitter, Yammer, and Facebook feeds and allows you to reply to each of these feeds. For the Facebook client, you can even post pictures, links, comments, and notes. Alert Thingy also lets you subscribe to RSS feeds from sites like Amazon and other popular news sites.

From a marketers perspective, Alert Thingy is very useful and it can save marketers a lot of time. They can come to one client and post all there outbound messages while maintaining a pulse on the network's conversations. This for sure is a time saver. Social media strategists, PR managers, or community managers will also benefit from this tool, since they are constantly monitoring social networks.

The following demo gives an overview of all the features in Alert Thingy:

I imagine that in the future, Alert Thingy could add analytic and CRM integration to allow it to become a more powerful marketing tool for people who want to leverage social networks in their marketing campaigns. It would be great if I could take all my customer contacts, invite them to a social network, and then send them messages; much like a drip email campaign. This way I could monitor who viewed my messages, replied, or who just subscribed to my posts, giving me the ability to monitor potential leads.

The application is decent to use. It took some time to find out what were all the functions. I would hope Alert Thingy would copy more of the functionality in the Yammer and Twitter clients. Most people who would use Alert Thingy probably started out with a Twitter or Yammer client and were on their way to covering their desktops with different social clients and open web browsers. Placing buttons and setting configurations in similar locations to the Twitter and Yammer client would make Alert Thingy easier to use. Also, not creating strange buttons, like the little circle for settings, but using a more common icon would help.

The other thing I believe Alert Thingy could do is to create a new logo and rename the product. Alert Thingy is not catchy enough and does not roll off ones tongue easily. A more catchy name would help the product spread virally and possibly help show some direction for where the product is headed. Right now the existing name and logo put Alert Thingy in the same boat as a RSS reader and I believe they have more potential than that.

You can find more information about Alert Thingy at www.alertthigy.com

Also, I am including a series of screen shots that showcase Alert Thingy's capabilities: