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Posts Tagged ‘seesmic-desktop’

Today brings good news for PC users everywhere. Seesmic is launching a native desktop client for Windows. Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur made the announcement today at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Le Meur says that providing a desktop client that was native for Windows was of huge importance because 80 percent of Seesmic users run their apps on a PC.

There are a few native Twitter clients out there to have been formatted for the Mac, such as Tweetie and Twitterfic. Windows users have previously limited options when it comes to native Twitter clients and are forced to either used web-based clients or use desktop clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. These are both based Adobe’s AIR platform, which is notorious for eating up memory and CPU cycles, along with weird window placement quirks.

Seesmic’s new desktop client will feature integration with just Twitter (Facebook will be added in the next few weeks) and will have much of the same functionality as the Adobe Air-powered client such as lists and multiple accounts, but it will be built on the .NET framework. This means the client will have a faster, better UI, lower memory consumption. Plus the client can take advantage of Windows7 modules such as location sensor, letting the user to post a location directly to Twitter.

The native Windows client will feature multi-language spell check, while the Air-powered Seesmic Desktop supports basic English. Another interesting feature of the client is a a plug-in architecture pretty much like on a browser, so Tweetmeme can write, for example, a plug-in that will give you how a tweet is spreading or the influence of a Twitter user. Because the Windows ecosystem, it will be much easier for developers to build plug-ins and add-ons off of the client. Le Meur says that building on Windows lets Seesmic offer this as a secure platform to developers, which is not possible or difficult on the Adobe Air or web-based platform.

There are other Twitter clients that have been developed for Windows, such as Sobees and Blu, but Seesmic will have the advantage of integration with Facebook and much more.

Seesmic has been in the news a lot lately thanks to the emergence of Twitter lists and geolocation. Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client and its web-based client was upgraded with both Lists functionality and geolocation.

To be honest, I was surprised to hear that 80 percent of Seesmic users use a PC. I guess in the Apple-centric world of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that stat. Now, I’m eagerly waiting for Seesmic to unveil a native client for the Mac. Watch out Tweetie!

Disclaimer: Michael Arrington is an investor of Seesmic; I am not.

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Seesmic, the startup behind the Twitter and Facebook desktop and web clients, is launching a new version of Seesmic Desktop that adds Facebook fan pages, yFrog integration, a “reply to all” button for messages and a favorites timeline. Developed by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, Seesmic recently launched its browser-based Twitter client at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in July. You can download the new version of Seesmic Desktop here.

Seesmic Desktop, which launched in April and has reached 2.5 million downloads, is an Adobe Air-powered client that has pulls in status updates from Facebook and Tweets from Twitter in a real-time feed. Today, Seesmic Desktop is furthering its integration with Facebook by allowing users to access and manage Facebook Pages. Users can view and post to activity feeds from any Facebook page they are fans of and can also manage their own fan pages. Each Facebook Page will show up as a column, where you can post messages, and respond to comments and express likes, just as you would in a Facebook feed. If you’re an administrator of fan pages, you can post messages as the administrator.

I think the compelling part of this feature is Seesmic’s play in the enterprise space. It’s no secret that businesses are actively suing both Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools and there have been a plethora of enterprise-friendly clients that help companies and brands manage social networking initiatives. Seesmic’s existing multi-Twitter user functionality and now the Facebook Fan Pages integration is definitely establishing the desktop client as a viable business application (as well as a useful consumer app).

Seesmic is launching a reply-all feature that lets users reply to all of the usernames listed in a message. This is useful when re-tweeting a message because the Reply-all function will simply Retweet the exact text of a message. Additionally, you can now add a “favorites” column to your interface that lets you mark and aggregate your favorite Tweets and messages.

Le Meur also says that TwitPic-rival Yfrog has been growing fast and when Seesmic was looking to partner with a Twitter picture posting service, Yfrog was the most attractive default picture posting service. Yfrog will now be implemented on all Seesmic products, including the browser version.

Speaking of Seesmic Products, I spoke to Le Meur about his much hyped iPhone app, which is scheduled to launch in October. Le Meur was tight lipped about details on the iPhone app’s features, but he did say that the experience on the desktop, browser and mobile versions of Seesmic will be the same. That means that the app will probably be integrated with both Facebook and Twitter. He did mention that the browser version of Seesmic will be integrated with Facebook within the next month as developers are currently tweaking the application’s functionality on different browsers. I’m a big fan of Seesmic’s web-based client, particularly because of its Gmail-like interface and the avoidance of using a desktop app built off of Adobe Air, which is buggy.

Seesmic faces competition from PeopleBrowser and rival Tweetdeck, which recently added MySpace functionality and a number of other features.

Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic. I am not.

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This week’s TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco brought together a number of threads and stories which have been kicking around the back of my mind for while. A little like Borat, I’ve been asking the Americans a lot of questions (though hopefully without the accompanying chaos).

The first one seems obvious but is worth spelling out one more time: to launch a consumer web service or, increasingly, mobile application, America remains the golden prize worth shooting for.

It is a large, homogeneous market which speaks one language. It is quite simply a no-brainer to really go for it there. That has always had implications for European startups. How do you launch in a market when you are not actually in the USA, or headquartered there? How do you get traction? It is of course perfectly possible.

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I had an informative chat with Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur at the TechFellow Awards Friday night, where he revealed to me the future plans for Seesmic Desktop, a desktop Twitter and Facebook client that’s built on Adobe Air. Seesmic will launch a new version of the desktop client next week that will let users compress their stream of Facebook updates and Twitter messages into one column. Currently, the client divides streams from different accounts and social networks into several columns.

The new version also features a new button that will let you post a Tweet to multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. And Seesmic will also let you see tracking stats from links sent out with url shortening service bit.ly. Seesmic’s current version lets you use a variety of other url shorteners, including tr.im and Snurl, but doesn’t let you see stats within the client itself.

According to Le Meur, Seesmic will soon be offering a browser based client. This offering is actually appealing, considering that Adobe’s AIR platform has some strange UI bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers. And Seesmic will also launch an iPhone app, which is currently under wraps along with the web-based product. Details about the features of the browser client and iPhone app will be officially unveiled at TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream CrunchUp on July 10.

Seesmic Desktop, which faces competition from popular client and rival Tweetdeck and a plethora of others, officially launched in April. Le Meur tells us that Seesmic is getting about 10,000 downloads a day. PeopleBrowsr, another social network aggregator, recently made the opposite switch, adding a desktop Adobe Air client to its browser product.

As TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters recently wrote, the social network aggregator market is almost fully saturated. It seems like every day there are new startups that are trying to venture into the already competitive landscape. So it makes sense that Seesmic would want to not only build up its offering with useful features, but also try to conquer all the mediums—web, desktop and mobile.

Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic. I am not.

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It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship - to put it mildly - on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which is served from outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have brought the the Great Wall of China on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail, Blogger and a number of other sites. The picture is patchy across the country between ISPs and geography, but my sources - who all agreed to be named in this post - say the ban is blanket ban is closing.

Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.

Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown. The move is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected.

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Few users seem to have noticed this, but apparently Twitter is no longer appending the correct application that was used to update user streams at the end of each message. Everything is marked as coming “from web”, even if the message was actually sent out from a desktop client, third-party web or mobile application.

Here’s the kicker: after some digging, I found that the company has learned about this issue a couple of days ago but decided not to fix it in order not to disturb the engineers during the weekend:

“With all the recent increase in Twitter API developers and ease of registering an OAuth application, we’re seeing a large growth in the source parameter database. The logic that appends source parameters to updates caches all of the source names in one large object. This object recently surpassed 1MB which is interesting because it is the largest size of an object that fits in memcached. The lack of ability to cache this object was causing an enormous hit on the database degrading performance.

The quick solution was to disable source parameters so that engineers didn’t need to give up their weekend. This will be fixed as soon as possible, likely early in June 1 workday.”

Guess they’re having a long weekend.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how this will affect the ranking of ‘most popular Twitter clients’ and the likes.

(Hat tip to Chris Cosentino)

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There is a heated competition taking place for which Twitter/Facebook desktop client is the fairest of them all. We’ve written about about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop, AlertThingy, Sobees, and the clients that focus only on Twitter (Tweetie, Nambu, Twitterific, etc.). Now, PeopleBrowsr, is entering beta with a free Adobe AIR-powered desktop app that integrates Twitter, Facebook and other social networks into one platform.

While in alpha, PeopleBrowsr was able to differentiate itself because it was a web browser based dashboard for social networks, sort of like what Streamy is now. Similar to Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop, PeopleBrowsr uses stacks. To add content, you add different stacks for each social network, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and your RSS feeds. Similar to all the Twitter clients mentioned above, Peoplebrowsr lets you do all the normal twitter activities (read, post, follow/unfollow, DM and reply). And you can update your Facebook status and engage in FriendFeed conversations from the dashboard.

Peoplebrowsr is offering different layouts of the streams according to the type of user you are. You are given the choice to run the app under Business mode, which is interesting given how Twitter, Facebook and others are now seen as marketing and PR tools. Companies, restaurants, brands and celebrities all seem to use Twitter as a business platform in some capacity. On first glance, Peoplebrowsr’s bells and whistles seem to cater towards the enterprise community. Business mode lets users manage multiple usernames within one dashboard (Seesmic does this too), conducts conversation threads within the client, and gives you the ability to share a “stack” via RSS or a URL link.

PeopleBrowsr also lets you create Twitter groups within the dashboard around keywords and #hashtags. If a group is built around a #hashtag, every time a new person uses that hashtag they are automatically added to the group. Users can browse public groups made by others as well as those based on popular hashtags.

PeopleBrowsr offers the ability to filter searches on Twitter by location, groups, specific individuals, posts containing links and sentiment associated with keywords. Results can be further sorted by the number of follower and searches saved for future access. PeopleBrowsr can be set up to send email alerts should a specific keyword appear in the stream. Updates and messages that are key can be flagged, and you can add private notes and comments to a specific user or post. You can also add users to a built in address book within the dashboard.

For businesses that want to create reports on Twitter feeds, keywords and direct messages, PeopleBrowsr lets you create custom reports can be exported as RSS feeds and retweets (to share publicly.

Like Seesmic and Tweetdeck, PeopleBrowsr is powered by Adobe’s AIR platform, which has some strange user interface bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers.

PeopleBrowsr doesn’t seem to be for the individual who uses a Twitter/Facebook desktop client to simply tweet, follow, DM and update status messages. But for the enterprise community, this application may make tracking social networks for a brand or company much easier. The startup is also retaining the web based browser dashboard that will include all the features of its desktop client. On the consumer side, it will be tough to break into the current race of popular desktop client apps, including Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck, who all have loyal followings. But it’s wise of PeopleBrowsr to appeal to the enterprise space and this could help the startup make a name for itself out of all the other clients out there.

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Twitscoop, a real-time visualization tool that lets you see hot trends and buzz on Twitter, is getting a makeover and adding several useful features that may help you “mine the thought stream.” These features will officially roll out at 8 AM PST. Twitscoop’s algorithm identifies tags and keywords in the Twitter stream and then ranks them by how frequently they appear versus normal usage. Twitscoop detects growing trends in real-time, identifies breaking news and then monitors specific keywords along with graphs that display the activity for any given word on twitter. The results are also displayed in a “Tag Cloud,” where the hotter tags are presented in a bigger front.

Besides showing the trending topics on Twitter, Twitscoop, which provides a service similar to Tweetag, Tweetmeme, and Twitturly, also lets you search Twitter messages for trending topics. Twitscoop is becoming a full-fledged Twitter service, adding oAuth to let you sign in with your Twitter account and tweet from the site without leaving the page. Additionally, you will be able shorten urls and tweet searches from the site.

The new additions to Twitscoop’s roster of features include a new and improved real-time tracking code and a redesign of the user interface. The right side of Twitscoop’s homepage displays in real-time the words which are “buzzing” right now on Twitter. This tag cloud is updated automatically, with tags continuously appearing, growing, shrinking and finally vanishing. When you hover over a tag, a popup window will appear, displaying the latest related tweets about the tag. If you click on the tag, you open up a search tab within the site which will display all the related tweets along with a custom graph showing the tags’ activity over the past few hours or days. The graph is an interesting feature that isn’t available on most of Twitscoop’s competitors and helps you understand the timeline of a trending topic.

On the left side of the homepage, Twitscoop shows general “trends” detected on Twitter. Clicking on any hot trend will open a tab with a snapshot of the corresponding search results by time frame, from 6 hours to 1 day to 3 days. I’m a fan of the way Twitscoop saves multiple searches in different tabs within the site. It makes it very easy to jump from one search to another without having to conduct the search over again.

Unlike competitor Tweetmeme, which measures trends and hot topics by links and is also adding innovative features, Twitscoop measure trends by keyword. Tweetag, another tag-based search engine for Twitter that also uses a tag cloud to show results, is also useful but doesn’t include the interactive graphs and in-depth features of Twitscoop. Twitter, which acquired Summize, whose technology currently powers Twitter Search, also features trending topics but doesn’t go into the same depth as Twitscoop either.

Twitscoop has lofty ambitions—the site hopes to not only be a go-to application to measure trends and buzz on Twitter, but also wants to be a major Twitter client, albeit a Web-based one. This field is packed with many worthy competitors including Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, and Nambu. Although it’s doubtful that Twitscoop will be able to take a large piece of the Twitter client pie, the site provides a useful way to find out what’s happening on Twitter that’s buzzworthy in real-time.

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This last Friday, a few of the developers behind Microsoft Surface took some time out of their schedules to meet with us and talk about what’s coming in their Surface Service Pack 1, due to be rolled out today. Now, it’s called a service pack for a reason — as opposed to a fun pack — this update is a response to the requests and concerns of the community using and developing for the Surface, so it’s not about flashy new gizmos and eye candy, but usability.

There are still a few new visible features, and it’s always fun to play with a Surface, so there’s a nice video for you to watch if you’re interested in how the Surface is changing and how Microsoft is responding to developer feedback. It’s easier to show them than explain them at length, so check them out in the exclusive video inside.

Forget Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey, there’s a genuine queen on Twitter these days: Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan, joined the tweeting masses yesterday and she really has a feel for the micro-medium too!

And yes, it’s the real deal since it was Matthias Lüfkens who filled us in on her presence on the micro-sharing service, and since Lüfkens works for the World Economic Forum in Davos (where Queen Rania is always a guest) he would know better than us. I asked for final confirmation and Lüfkens responded that he’s 100% sure since he had received an e-mail from Marzia Bisignani (who works for Jordan’s Royal Court).

So in case you were in doubt if Queen Rania’s life is more interesting than yours: about two hours ago, she tweeted “Just choppered to airport to receive Pope. Husband piloting, he got acrobatic to quiet butterflies in stomach told u he was action man!”.

She likes to relax too, though: “Wknd begins for us, watching Matthew McConaughey in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Glad I’m not single. It’s vicious out there!”

Her highness started out with the web version, then switched to TweetDeck but seems to do her mobile tweeting with twibble. I’m sure Loïc Le Meur is bummed that she hasn’t tried out Seesmic Desktop yet.

I’m just genuinely psyched she joined altogether. I’ve been following her official YouTube channel ever since she started one and I’m always impressed with her views on society and education, and the way she uses digital means to get her message across.

Now go follow her.

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