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.
Good luck to Loic. It seems Seesmic is still searching for the pony.
Sounds pretty cool, but i am quite sure that i will use mixero to reduce my twitter-noise
I love Loic – but I still did not use his funky seesmic – why?
Is Seismic looking for a new product line and revenue model now that its video platform doesn’t appear to be a sustainable business?
I’m curious. How does Seesmic make money???
Traffic is the new cash?
Seesmic could plug ads in the streams, or sponsored tweets.
I wonder why they dont do it yet.
They probably don’t make any money right now.. most of the apps haven’t made money. Before they turn to monetization, they need to build up their user base and that’s what they are into right now.
Once you have the right amount of user base, you can start monetizing or heck, sell it off to a bigger company
I’m impressed – bring on the iPhone app! (as long it has sync of course…)
Disclaimer? Arrington is a shareholder in Seesmic
Apologies for leaving that out. Updated with disclosure.
I usually end up doing a force quit on the Adobe Air app so keeping it contained to the web browser (spinning pinwheel) would be great. After broadcasting with Qik, Ustream, etc on iPhone I’m curious to see how Seesmic will perform async (assuming?).
Was there any hinting as to Seesmic’s iPhone app doing party to party video chat or is this limited to a mobile option for traditional post/reply?
Considering the recent furore, isn’t a disclosure missing from this article?
My own disclosure:
I really like Seesmic..
As for ” social network aggregator market is almost fully saturated” you should watch out for http://getOnePage.com
if at first you don’t succeed, just throw some more noodles at the wall ….
To the guy above, I have you beat, check out…
http://getTwoPages.com
An iphone app ok cool, but why not an addons for FF ? Follow Twitter or/and Facebook directly in FF is less painful for me. I hate to switch between tabs or apps to follow my updates.
Great, Yoono is for you!
Yoono supports Twitter, Facebook, MySpace… directly in your browser without tab switch.
For FireFox user I recommend TwitterLine, one of the best twitter firefox addons out there!
Oh but twitterline is only for twitter, right ? Yoono is for twitter, facebook, myspace, and more (soon on IE too).
While I appreciate the founder/ceo doing what he can to create value for his investors (it seems like he is a very smart, super good guy) – I have to say – it must be nice to experiment with someone elses money. This company is all over the map.
I bet they launch a “real-time” something-or-other within 2 months.
Anyway – I wish them luck and hope to see them at the top.
I still use Twhirl, much preferring the ability to have separate thin windows, plus it ties in with bit.ly fully which seesmic hasn’t yet
by far the hottest tc writer
Nice feature of combining the feeds, lots of people (myself included) have a bad case of “social media echo”
Any news on PeopleBrowsr developing a phone app as it would make sense to have them all around the place.
am I the only person who thinks that “posting to multiple twitter accounts at the same time” seems scary? like spam scary?
Seesmic is a giant bag of fail.
this piece of crap gets way to much cover
loic is a nice guy but why the hell you would put dollars into watching him meander around the world like a celebrity is beyond me
Interesting comment on the ’stream’ of messages and broadcast features.
xIMpp has these as original design features to handle message streams from multiple services (including Seesmic, we get their public timeline as an XMPP feed).
xIMpp will be released to as a private beta soon and is targeted at business users.
I am liking Seesmic more that Tweetdeck, in fact I haven’t opened TD since..I do hate the memory issue, but that has been a problem with most of them.
Seesmic has all the features but will some ask Loic why he’s not into making it LOOK BETTER!! Twhirl was soooo good when it came to UI, but seesmic desktop isn’t easy on the eyes and I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about it!
seesmic is forever in search of a business model. every week it seems this place is taking a another approach to something else.
I’ve been wondering why there aren’t any good browser-based Twitter clients with more functionality than the basic Twitter site.
I guess you haven’t checked the new release of Yoono
I second that! it is Amazing!!!
Seesmic works much better for me than Tweetdeck. I’m on 64 bit Vista and TD just doesn’t like that at all – constantly crashes. Known problem, but who knows when it gets fixed (maybe it already has been in the past month or so?)
Seesmic hasn’t crashed once. Not the prettiest thing ever, but does the job very nicely.
That said, I’m going to give Mixero a try per favorable comments from @casi above. Their video demo looks pretty sharp.
And none of them come anywhere close to Flock the social browser! Why? Cos they can’t incorporate RSS feeds, or your friends updates to their photos on sites such as Facebook, flickr,picasa, etc.
just wish more folks new about Flock, its been doing all of this for ages. Get it here at http://www.flock.com and see what I mean………..
Oh why bother with a new browser when all you need really is install the Yoono add-on into your firefox or IE ?
It already has the great seesmic innovation of “let users compress their stream of Facebook updates and Twitter messages into one column” (wow), an amazing ’share’ feature that allows to send rich content to twitter, facebook, myspace, major IMs, … and so much more…
Good news on the updates but +1 for investing in the interface look & feel. I use Seesmic in spite of its aesthetics.
Wondering if Loic Le Meur still has money left over?
Comparing seesmic with vimeo
http://siteanal....com+vimeo.com/
I have stopped using Adobe Air Twitter clients recently as they just bring my Laptop to a crawling pace. I do have TweetDeck and Seesmic installed but tend to tweet more whilst being mobile so Tweetie all the way. Will definitely check out a Seesmic iPhone app!!
what about THEIR CORE BUSINESS if video conversations? Are they admitting defeat?
Ok now they’re just getting better and better. I’m always a fan of Seesmic Desktop, however due to the limited memory of my over-aged laptop I’m still stick with Twhirl most of the time. Gosh.. I really need a upgrade! Anticipating for the new releases. =P
@wchingya
social media/blogging
Good work, 10.000 downloads a day is very impressive! But beside the $12M investment I wonder if there’s some cash flow, can you answer that question for us Loic?