THE DREAM IN ACTION

Seesmic Desktop Take over Twhirl Focus

Seesmic Desktop, the new desktop twitter client launched its beta to the private Team Seesmic yesterday evening. This app was built by the same team behind Seesmic.com, the video conversation site, and Twhirl, the #1 downloaded Adobe Air twitter app. Being a loyal supporter of the startup I downloaded and gave it a test run. Here are my thoughts…

I read a post yesterday about Nambu and thought it had a great “Mac like” interface but didn’t get a chance to give it a run. I’m glad I waited because the Seesmic Desktop clients has the same beautiful interface with much better features.

Michelle Lentz compared the two and said:

Not only is this a bit more stable than Nambu, it gives me the same features but includes those bonus things I liked so much in Twhirl. Seesmic listened closely to the Twhirl users and incorporated what we asked for: columns, groups, and one Home column, and search.

Functionality

Seesmic’s Desktop client runs on Adobe Air so it’s good for you PC folks and it seems to be much less invasive that Tweetdeck. You can condense your @reply’s, dm’s, and regular tweets to one column, similar to Twhirl, or you can have separate columns like Tweetdeck. This gives you the flexibility to control the user experience. It’s very easy to tweak using a drag and drop interface.

As many of you may know, REACH by SocialDreamium, has focused on the use of multiple Twitter accounts; now Seesmic has too. They bring multiple accounts into one column so that you can still watch one stream from multiple accounts. Lentz, compared the experience to “having one inbox for all your email accounts”. Going along with the flexibility theme, you still can separate the accounts into columns if you’d like.

One of the main pieces of feedback the Seesmic team got from the Twhirl community was that grouping is critical. People want to be able to manage all of their followers and as those numbers grow it gets very difficult, as I wrote about in a previous post. Seesmic Desktop uses “User Lists” that is apparently different from “groups”. See video below for explanation on that feature.

The standard URL shortening (bit.ly, digg, tinyurl) has been integrated with one really cool addition: photos can be dragged and dropped to the app for tweeting. It’s integrated with TwitPic to post the pictures and you can shoot a pic easily from your web cam to tweet as well. Why Seesmic didn’t add the option for a quick video equivalent of TwitPic leveraging their existing Seesmic.com interface I do not know. That seemed to be an obvious integration but maybe it will come in later versions of the tool. (@loic give me cred if I thought of that first)

The same annoying dings are worked into this tool from Twhirl but are simple to turn off. This took me about 3 seconds to get done as I hate those dings. As I write this only Twitter is integrated into Seesmic Desktop but as they added apps to Twhirl I’m sure they will add apps to this tool as well.

My Encouragement

It is important to note that it’s unfair to completely judget this tool just yet. It’s only released to the Seesmic test team, however that team is now quite large as I understand it. I’m looking forward to seeing what Loic & squad come up with next and I definitely will continue to support them. As for now, I’m officially uninstalling Tweetdeck. It’s overbearing on my system and I generally don’t love the tool.

The SocialDreamium Reaction

From a SocialDreamium standpoint we will use these tools as inspiration and continue to develop our application in a direction that we believe will still be a very valuable tool for certain niche markets. We have no intention of treating this as large competition and even if we did, here is a great video about how to treat competition, ironically from Loic, Seesmic’s founder.

If you’ve tried out Seesmic Desktop, help out the team by giving feedback and let me know what you think in the comments! Below is the Seesmic Desktop launch video.