July 13, 2009, 8:11 AM — Last week, Seesmic launched a new web-based Twitter client (as well as a fairly substantial update to its Adobe Air-based Seesmic Desktop client). I spent the weekend playing around with it, and am happy to report that, while still rough around the edge, Seesmic Web has potential.
In its default configuration Seesmic Web looks a lot like the desktop version, with multiple columns: one for all incoming Tweets (they call this Timeline), one for Mentions (aka Replies) and one for Sent Tweets. These can be toggled on or off from a navigation pane on the left side of the screen. There is also a Direct Message column, but for some reason that takes over the app's window and you can only see the DM column by itself.
One of the interesting features Seesmic Web introduces is a 'List' view. Toggling this on shows a list of Tweets, sans icon, in a view that resembles an email client's in-box. It allows you to scan Tweets very quickly. Clicking on a Tweet brings up a menu allowing you to Reply, DM, Retweet or Report Spam.
Scroll to the bottom of a pane and you'll find a 'More' button similar to the one on the Twitter web page. Clicking it loads the next ten Tweets, moving in reverse chronological order.
Seesmic's Loic Lemeur calls this a "Preview" version of the Seesmic Web (see his video at the bottom of this post), and there are a few features missing as well as a few rough edges. There's no support for multiple accounts, for one thing. Nor are there any user-defined Settings. In the List view, particularly, I'd like for the 'More' button to bring up more than ten Tweets at a time and I'd like to define what that number is. When a new Tweet arrives, it has a tinted background to show that it is new, but there's no way to indicate which Tweets you've read; this would be particularly helpful across sessions. I also had some problems where a new Tweet coming in would 'reset' a pane to the default Tweets (though that appears to have already been addressed).
But these few caveats aside, for a first whack at a richly featured web-based app, Seesmic Web is pretty interesting. It is free to use at http://seesmic.com/web/.
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