Seesmic Desktop Overview

by Veena

There’s a huge buzz today about Seesmic Desktop, an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application that is free to download and works with both PCs and Macs. Installation is a real breeze. Add and authorize your Twitter account and away you go. It also supports multiple Twitter accounts, a feature currently lacking in TweetDeck, another popular Twitter updater. Seesmic Desktop can be used for posting to Facebook and viewing status updates, you can also add comments, like items, view the comment and likes on individual wall posts, and even view photos in friends’ timelines. It’s really a fantastic way to engage with both Facebook and Twitter right from the same app.

Seesmic Desktop has Twitgoo, Posterous, and Pikchur for adding pictures to tweets. The new Seesmic Desktop is a dream application for the frequent status updater. One can add multiple Twitter accounts and unlimited columns to the Twitter-only desktop client. Seesmic Desktop comes with many amazing new features – the new URL shortener options — Digg’s new shortener is included — userlists (Seesmic Desktop’s name for groups), and the fact that duplicate tweets (across multiple Twitter accounts) are nonexistent. It also has the ability to snap images via webcam for posting to Twitpic. All of this activity is now conveniently residing within one window.

In the configuration settings you can do cool things like select how you want your re-tweets to be displayed: either as the standard RT, or by the full ‘retweet’, the ‘via’ method or ‘as said’ methods. Notifications that prompt you when you receive certain kinds of tweets can be received either with a sound or visual pop-up (or both, or neither).

The software defaults to a one-column display using the ‘home’ pane. This is your entire Twitter stream – everybody you follow. If you click on your username under ‘Accounts’ in the sidebar, the home pane gets some extra tabs: replies, direct messages, archives (messages sent by you) and a very handy ‘lookup’ feature, which lets you do a quick search on any Twitter account.

Seesmic also has a tie into Twitter and YouTube. So when you post a video on Seesmic, it can message out to Twitter and upload the video to YouTube automatically. This is a great way for Seesmic to drive traffic to itself.

All tweets also show both the user and real name of the tweeter. This is a nice touch, and makes everything that little bit more personable. Avatar’s are used in a similar way to TweetDeck – scroll your mouse over and four options will pop-up, allowing you to easily reply, re-tweet or direct message a user, with an extra button for additional functionality (like adding to groups).

So let’s look at some of the most noticed pros and cons of Seesmic Desktop:

Pros

• Supports multiple Twitter accounts
• Replies are mentioned
• Shows the real name of the user within a tweet
• Has a mute button
• Closed panes aren’t deleted – they move to your sidebar
• Has built-in support for Twitpic and a webcam function

• Uses only about half of the memory that TweetDeck needs

Cons

• Seems to crash fairly regularly and when it does you lose all front-end configuration
• Groups require manual additions and can be a bit awkward
• Doesn’t display which tweet another user has replied to, so tracing conversations is awkward
• Doesn’t track API usage, but limits you to 80 calls/hour
• No warning when deleting a tweet

Overall, the seismic Desktop has earned its place in the hearts of all who are crazy about tweeting or updating facebook regularly. With each new version, Seesmic Desktop is getting better and better.

Related articles:

• Desktop Tweet – Capture Your Screen And Tweet It As Well (techie-buzz.com)
• Seesmic on Web: Twitter Web Client (technology.johnsamuel.in)