As the social media, social networks and aggregators of these services continue their relentless onslaught forward developers of desktop applications are doing an incredible job of trying to provide solid desktop interfaces to all these services. A good example of this is the large community of applications that have sprung up around Twitter and looks to be doing the same for FriendFeed.

This morning Corvida of SheGeeks had two excellent posts that took a look at the day’s news that twhirl had released an update that included support for FriendFeed. For those of you who don’t know the program twhirl is an Adobe AIR desktop application for using the Twitter service. In her second post about Alert Thingy should stay in it’s own lane she says the following:

On the other hand, I think it would be too much to place on the developers of Alert Thingy. By saying this, I am in no way attempting to challenge them. I’m just stating that the demands for having to keep track of two very different web services could result in serious backlogs and high demands by users.

As a previous developer of a desktop application for Twitter I know all too well the headaches that are headed a developer’s way as they continually try to keep abreast with new services that people want applications for. The debate of whether to support a new service with an existing application or whether it should be another stand alone application that they will have to continually update as new features are added to a service. Either way developers are basically screwed.

If they go the route of adding the new service to an existing application; such as twhirl has done, there are issues of how best to integrate the service into the existing UI and still remain useable. If they go the route of dealing with it as a separate applications they get flack from the userbase of these services about wanting a single interface for everything. Sure the single interface might be a great idea and definitely has its merits right up until users start bitching about how much of their system resources the application is using.

This is a big problem for developers because what users of these; or any multi-use application for that matter, service application don’t understand is that user interfaces are the most resource hungry beasts out there. As well you have to be able to have the code connecting to these resources on a continual basis in order to keep the data being displayed current with what is available from the service itself and this all takes up resources.

For Adobe AIR developers this is especially hard because the technology is still relatively new and as such is possibly still shaking out the platform which means it may not always be as lean and resource friendly as developers might like it to be. This doesn’t matter to end users as they see enormous amount of resources being used by these applications and they start raising a fuss.

In some cases they are justified as a lot of this resource hogging can be attributed to just plain bad coding on the part of the developer but sometimes there just is no choice in the matter. You as a user of these desktop applications that let you use the social networks and the such in a way that you like might not like seeing high resource usage but you know what - sometimes it just can’t be frikken helped.

I don’t know really which of the two different ways is the best for developers to deal with the issue of adding new services to their applications but I do know that if users of those services want desktop applications to use with them then at some point you are just going to have to accept the fact that the more services you add to the mix the more you are going to have applications that need resources to do the job you want done. Unlike Web 2.0 computer resource aren’t free and unlimited - they come with a price.

Conversation Tags: social networks, social media, aggregators, desktop applications, developers