New Seesmic Desktop App for Twitter Targets TweetDeck

By Kyle Austin

April 7th, 2009

Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur just held a press conference (on Ustream as well) at Seesmic’s San Francisco Headquarters to announce Seesmic Desktop, a new Twitter client (currently being previewed) that will look to compete with TweetDeck, the most popular Twitter desktop app to date. Seesmic has completely re-written the code from their existing destop Twitter app – Twhirl - (4th most popular Twitter client), which has 1.2 million downloads to date and 200,000 active users updating with new versions. Loic noted that they will discontinue writing new versions of Twhirl and focus on Desktop moving forward. Although the preview version of Desktop won’t support FriendFeed and Facebook, as Twhirl currently does, they will look to build in that functionality in the near future.

Loic called the new Seesmic Desktop app, “The Bloomberg of social software,” offering multiple columns across your desktop. At the conclusion of the press conference Seesmic sent out a preview release (picture embedded below) of the new app (go here to receive), which I’m currently giving a run.

New Features:

• Multiple accounts in one. Loic focused on the ability to use multiple accounts at once within one column. This is a good new feature for folks like myself that are use to having multiple Twhirl windows open for personal and brand handles. Not only do they become hard to manage, they also drain memory from your PC. When a tweet comes into the first column of Seesmic Desktop it notes which handle it was received as. If you go to respond to that message, Desktop will use the handle which received the message as the default responding handle. Those that are using multiple accounts will just have to double-check that they are responding under the correct handle.
• Bloomberg / TweetDeck Column set-up. Reply, direct message and search columns that can be adjusted on the fly. You can move around where you want to place columns, including existing search columns from left to right and right to left.
• PeopleBrowsr-like lists that can sort your contacts under different columns. A nice add on, especially when you consider that it can do this with multiple accounts in use.
• Drag and drop phots. Twhirl was one of the first apps to really push Twitpic. Seesmic is improving those capabilities by allowing drag and drop photo insertion with Seesmic Desktop.
• More stable than TweetDeck? Although I don’t use TweetDeck, many of my colleagues swear by it. The one problem? It is a huge memory drain on their PC and highly unstable. Some folks I know, have had major issues signing onto TweetDeck for over week now, because of this instability. Loic made a point to say that although this is a preview of the new app / client, it is much more stable than TweetDeck.

Entry Filed under: Digital Media Relations,Social Media,Twitter