The TechnoFile

Seesmic Desktop shakes up the Twitter-scape

Last night saw the launch of a new Adobe Air-based Twitter client, Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic are the folks who purchased the popular Twhirl client last year. It's pretty clear that Seesmic Desktop is gunning for TweetDeck, the Twitter client that's very popular with Twitter power users. From the sound of things, the current plan for Seesmic is to maintain both Twhirl and the new client.

I've only spent an hour or so playing around with Preview Release of Seesmic Desktop, so rather than try any kind of in-depth review I'll just give an overview of some of the major features.

First, Seesmic Desktop supports multiple "panes" inside the client that can be used to organize incoming and outgoing tweets. A navigation column on the left side of the client offers the usual selections ("Home," "@Replies," "Private," "Sent") as well as a list of accounts, user lists and searches. Clicking any one of these bring the applicable tweets into the "main" pane, and from there you can "tear off" that filtered list into a separate pane. You can have an unlimited number of these torn off panes, and if the client window isn't wide enough to display them all, a horizontal scroll bar will appear to let you "scrub" back and forth between them while always keeping the default pane visible.

Note I said accounts, plural. Seesmic Desktop supports multiple Twitter accounts (support for other services such as FriendFeed and Facebook are planned but not yet implemented). You can quickly pick which account to post under, and you can either merge incoming tweets or filter them into separate panes, one for each account.

Userlists are a way to filter the people you follow into groups. Mousing over a tweeter's icon and choosing the "gear" lets you add that user to a list via a pop-up menu. That's nice and all, but they really need to give us a way to just type in Twitter usernames rather than searching for a tweet from that user. Also, be wary of clicking the "Remove" button on a list's pane; it'll delete your painstakingly created list! Use the "Close" button instead. (This was definitely user-error on my part, but an "Are you sure?" prompt would be welcome.)

At the bottom left of the client is a search box. Enter a term here and a new pane will open up with the results, plus the search will show up in the left nav. As long as you don't remove that pane, the search will be updated whenever the client polls Twitter. Pretty handy for terms you follow regularly, or if some big event is ongoing and you want to monitor it.

At the top of the client window is an input box for your updates. Entering a shortened URL feels a little cumbersome. First you click "Add a URL" which opens an input box.

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