The battle for the desktop internet browser has raged on in the 90s and returned at the beginning of this decade with the launch of Firefox. That was the last desktop web centric application battle that we witnessed. When Adobe Air launched last year, many were predicting the future integration of desktop applications and web based services. Honestly, that’s like saying that something big will come out of this thing they call “the internet”. We know something will happen but we don’t know what it will be.

Well it appears as though the first battle has begun for desktop based applications that integrate with web services. Mike Arrington calls it “The Twitter/Friendfeed Desktop Client Arms Race.” Both services are extremely early but yesterday when AlertThingy launched with FriendFeed integration I figured it would truly be the end of Twhirl. That shows how much I know.

Within days, Twhirl added FriendFeed support and Twhirl is back in the lead again. I could cover all of the minute adjustments made by both these applications but considering that this is sure to be constantly evolving over the coming months, I’ll stay away from writing about it too much. One thing that I will say is that FriendFeed has now made its way onto my desktop. Even though I haven’t been a huge fan of FriendFeed, having alerts showing up on my desktop makes a lot of sense.

Do you use FriendFeed? If not, check out the new Twhirl application. It looks promising.

Last night Techcrunch and Loic Le Meur announced Seesmic’s acquisition of Twhirl, an application we previously reviewed on our site. I got the beta invite to Seesmic a few months back and tried it out once. I had some serious issues with Seesmic. The main issue was that it takes way too long to post a video and listen to a video playback then read a maximum 140 character message.

Loic appears to be making a smart move with the Twhirl acquisition because now your videos can fit directly into the application. This is similar to the video commenting feature provided by Viddler. I’ve seen a few people use this added feature but so far all of the video comments I’ve seen have been half a second long and of no significant value.

Will you take the time to leave a video comment in reply to a Tweet? I’m sure Loic sure thinks so but based on the lack of growth of the site it’s hard to see where the value is. There are not as many avid Seesmic users as there are Twitter users but then again it only launched around 6 months ago so it hasn’t had time to “cross the chasm.” Do you think Seesmic will succeed?