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Posts Tagged ‘sobees’

We’ve written about Twitter client Sobees, which is working to create the best social media client on the market, competing with both TweetDeck and Seesmic. Today Sobees is releasing a new version of its Windows native desktop app built in .NET, complete with realtime search, a redesign and more.

The new client includes support for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn (which was added late last year). The most significant addition is the availability of realtime search on the client, with the ability to search Twitter, Friendfeed, OneRiot and FacteryLabs from within the application. Sobees integrated elements of its newly launched realtime web dashboard to power search in the client.

Sobees has also added drag and drop technology for columns in order to change the place of a column within the client. Other technical updated include the ability to preview Tweets and maps, translate messages, and see pictures posted on TwitPic from within the Tweet. And Sobees will break out threaded conversations you have with friends.

Sobees is competing in a crowded space where each client continues to innovate and offer users more options for managing their social media accounts and the reealtime web. For example, Seesmic has incorporated Ping.fm, to allows users to update more than 50 different social networks at the same time. And TweetDeck now incorporates YouTube and Flickr within its client. For now, Sobees doesn’t have any mobile clients but we are told that iPhone and Android apps are coming soon.

There’s no shortage of real-time search engines that are tracking the web and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for results. Collecta, OneRiot, Microsoft’s Bing and Google all offer compelling search engines to tap into the real-time stream. Today, social media client Sobees is jumping into the stream with its real-time search discovery platform.

The platform, which is powered by Microsoft Silverlight and runs on top of Windows Azure, has the look and feel of Sobees’ Twitter client. Within the page, the search offering aggregates searches by categories in five columns or modules including real-time search (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facterylabs and OneRiot), image search (Bing, Flickr, Google and Yahoo), video search (Bing, Google and Youtube), web search (Bing, Google and Yahoo) and news search (Bing, Google, New York Times and Yahoo).

For each column, the user can filter results by choosing to click off services, or click off columns all together. You can also choose to search from trending topics pulled from Twitter and Yahoo that are updated in real-time. While the engine is a standalone sight, it will soon be included in Sobees’ Twitter client as well. The real-time search platform is fairly innovative and could be a good companion to the the client

Although the third-party social media application space is crowded, Sobees seems to be doing well for itself. Its client, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn. The startup recently struck a deal with Yahoo in December to integrate the client in Yahoo Mail in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (the application is called “My Social Networks”).

Sobees will also be launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search, geolocation, lists and most of the basic Twitter functionality. A native iPhone app is in the pipeline. I’m a fan of Sobees and find myself wishing the startup offered a mac-client.

Different territories demand different marketing approaches. Google, for instance, has been spotted taking the unusual route of promoting their search engine and Chrome browser with print advertising campaigns in India and The Netherlands, respectively.

And now a reader informs us that Facebook is buying Google ads on the search giant’s India portal (Google.co.in). You can see some examples embedded in this post or on our tipster’s blog.

It’s impossible to determine if this is new, but perhaps Indian TechCrunch readers can tell us if these just started popping up or if they’ve been running for a while. I’ve been trying out searches for people on a couple of other country portals but haven’t seen any Google AdWords campaigns from Facebook at first glance. We’ve contacted Facebook for more information.

The move is fairly ironic for two distinct reasons: first, because Facebook has been struggling to become the leader in social networking in India at the expense of Orkut, which is of course a Google service (it depends on who you ask which one is effectively leading, but Facebook has definitely been making strides all around the world).

Second: in June 2009, Facebook hired away Google’s Grady Burnett, who had been leading the Mountain View company’s AdWords business in Ann Arbor, Mich. He’s now Director, Global Online and Inside sales at Facebook.

Also noteworthy: when you effectively click through on one of these Facebook ads, you don’t actually run a search query on the person you’ve been looking for – it just redirects you to the Facebook homepage where you have to renew your search to find him or her. Surely, there must be ways to improve that process?

Have you spotted any Facebook advertising on Google in your country? Let us know.

(Thanks for the tip, Ricky)

The evolution of Twitter clients have been speeding along. While Twitter is the fundamental platform that formed a base for many applications, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, PeopleBrowsr and Sobees, these platforms soon looked to other social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed for additional integration. And many have conquered all mediums, with desktop, web and mobile apps. In fact, the Twitter client race has gradually become a competition to be the first to launch useful and powerful apps that are chock full of features. Sobees, which has flown relatively under the radar, is one of the first clients to launch LinkedIn integration after the professional social network just released its API.

Sobees, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and now LinkedIn. Sobees will pull in a full feed from LinkedIn including connections updates, status updates, applications updates, jobs posted, groups joined, recommendations and profiles changes. You can also post status updates from the client, maintain connections, search your LinkedIn stream, and view profiles of connections.

In addition to LinkedIn, Sobees previously added a Facebook full feed, with the inclusion of profiles, friends, events, two-way status updates and your Inbox; and MySpace activities, including status, top friends and comments, with the possibility to update your status. And Sobees supports multiple Twitter accounts, replies, retweets, spam reporting, blocking users, replies to all, updates to status, posting pictures, shortening urls, and spell check.

Sobees desktop offers Twitter lists but the web client does not include list functionality yet. And geolocation will be added to both versions of the clients soon. You can also search Twitter and Friendfeed and enable the client in English, French, German, Italian and soon Spanish.

And in its first venture in the mobile space, Sobees is launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search and most of the basic Twitter functionality. While the app doesn’t yet have geolocation or lists, Sobees will be adding these features in the near future. Sobees says that an iPhone app is in the pipeline as well.

The Twitter client space is crowded, but it seems that Sobees could make its mark with its various clients. Its Windows client is particularly compelling and will face competition from Seesmic’s recently launched Windows app. But Sobees’ clients, both web and desktops, already feature MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter functionality, making it the most all-inclusive offering on the market. Seesmic and TweetDeck both have mobile offerings which are more expansive but Sobees hopes to boost its Android app soon. So why have we not heard more about Sobees? deskNet, the startup that develops Sobees, is bootstrapped and the company’s founder, Francois Bochatay, says that it simply has not been doing an PR or marketing outreach.

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For a while now, we’ve been tracking a number of companies who are hard at work trying to build the ultimate social networking desktop app. We’ve talked about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop, AlertThingy, and there are many more especially if you also include the ones that focus only on Twitter (Tweetie, Nambu, Twitterific, etc.).

Another horse in this race that barely gets a mention is Sobees, probably in big part because of the fact it’s only available for Windows users (with the latest .NET framework, moreover), although it doesn’t really deserve to be below the radar this much at all.

We covered the company’s social network aggregator when it entered public beta, and wrote that they were aiming to attract a mainstream audience for their software, which enables users to manage a fairly wide variety of web apps and social networking services from their desktops. It’s a nifty companion that plugs into Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and many more web services, but I’ve always felt it was far too overloaded with features for me to use it on a daily basis.

So I was interested when the company set out to build a stand-alone client for Twitter, Facebook and Twitter Search. And just as they were working on that, Facebook launched its Open Stream API so they made thankful use of it quite rapidly and converted the API to .NET and integrated the stream into the new client. The software is now in alpha and publicly available under the name bDule, and it’s definitely worth checking out even if you only use one of the two services it supports.

Soon, we’ll do a feature-by-feature comparison for all the existing social desktop applications, but for now let me just say Sobees is very much worthy of being included whenever someone talks about Facebook / Twitter clients. As mostly all of the apps mentioned on top bDule is a bit of a memory drain, and at times renders a bit slow, but the UI is really well thought-out (love the different templates you can switch to in just one mouse-click) and it does what it’s supposed to do really well.

Too bad it’s Windows / .NET only, because I’m sure there’s an audience out there that’s looking for just this type of app.

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