Feedalizr Review: Lifestreaming on the Desktop

Feedalizer is an Adobe Air desktop lifestreaming application built by MIH Swat in South Africa. It’s interesting because of the way it currently integrates with Twitter but it also features support for Facebook, Jaiku and Flickr. However, Feedalizr has found most if it’s popularity because of it’s integration with Friendfeed.

Friendfeed is a lifestreaming app that is a few steps to the left of Twitter. Whereas Twitter relies heavily upon manual entries and constant interaction, Friendfeed can be very hands-off, aggregate all your ‘doings’ on the web meaning you never really interact with it at all. Ironically, despite the freedom it allows, it’s become a great place to hold conversations around content posted on other services. Right now there are only a handful of desktop tools that allow you to manage your Friendfeed account remotely: FriendfeedIM, Twirl, AlertThingy and Feedalizr.

^{Note: In full disclosure, I’m using a beta version of a forthcoming Feedalizr release sent to me by the developers. This version comes out in a few days but it’s stable enough for a review.}

Where it Excels

I’m a big fan of the way this app works. I’m actually in love with it. It centralizes all my various micromessaging accounts, a big time saver when you want to send blasts to all of them in quick succession. It supports nested comments, so that when you’ve got like thirty responses to one post, the thread doesn’t take up the whole screen. It’s fast, updating the whole data stream only takes a few seconds on my poor 64k connection in Uganda. Feedalizr supports filtering by username or service (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed etc.) in case you just want to see entries posted from that particular account or service.

The design is very modern and aesthetically appealing which is good. There’s nothing worse than a great app that’s a beast to look at (*ahem* VoxOx).

Where it Needs Work

Feedalizr’s an awesome Air app with a lot of potential but there are some areas where it could use some improvement. For one, every time I log in to the application it asks me for my Friend Feed “remote API key”. This isn’t data I just have lying around and it’s a pain to have to log-in to get it from Friendfeed, the whole point of using an app like this is so I never have to visit the website. This can be solved by “remembering” the key, but this really should go on 100% behind the scenes.

The UI could use some retooling as well, particularly the scrollbar. The biggest annoyance is that scrollbar isn’t ’sticky’ meaning when I’m reading an entry, if new items are pulled in, the whole window starts to scroll…comments collapse along with anything you happened to be writing. I can’t even put into words how annoying this is. The simple solution is to just let everything stay as is, until you decide you want to scroll up to see any new items. It’s also impossible to scroll while reading a long Friendfeed thread…as soon as you begin scrolling, the comments collapse. This is also pretty obnoxious and prevents me from being able to interact as quickly as I would like to.

Feedalizr has a headline runner called ‘Hot Topics’ that pops-up and displays all the new aggregated activity. Unfortunately, it’s distracting. Luckily you can easily turn it off in the ’settings’ section. I use OSX and I’ve got Growl installed for just this purpose. It would, however, be nice to be able to turn off the ‘auto-scroll’ feature so that I can just click through the headlines manually.

Another minor pet peeve is that when I click on links from the Feedalizr stream, they open in a new browser window instead of a tab an an existing window. This is annoying for bloggers who like to toggle between tabs while writing. Toggling between windows within the same application is a different key command and if you aren’t expecting it, it’s bothersome.

Feedalizr also doesn’t support multiple accounts. I have two Twitter accounts, one “personal” and on “professional” account. I’d like to be able to manage them both from one app.

Conclusion and My Wish List

Feedalizr is very robust app that attempts to do a lot. It does those big things very well, but it’s the little things that can spoil the user experience. In my case, the scrollbar drives me crazy. I was using the OSX version of Feedalizr and I’m not sure how much of the UI kinks might be specific to the OS, but with AIR it shouldn’t matter so I’m assuming the same nuances exist on Windows and Linux as well.

Despite my critiques, Feedalizr borders on perfect! It’s simple to set-up and easy to use. I’d really like to see them add support for some other applications; Pownce and Plurk come immediately to mind. I’d also like to see the the ability to integrate La.coni.ca iterations using individual API keys. And it would be convenient if things like wall-to-wall and the lifestream from Facebook could be integrated. All in all Feedalizr is great. It’s just replaced TweetDeck and Twitterific as my weapon of choice for Twitter and it’s actually improved my interaction with FreindFeed and Jaiku.

It’s awesome to see such a cool stuff coming out of Africa!