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Seesmic Desktop – My Initial Impressions of the Facebook Integration

Twitter clients seem to be a dime a dozen these days.  There have been hundreds that have popped up for any number of the major platforms out there.  Seesmic Desktop has been getting a lot of press lately since it was announced, and since Seesmic makes my favorite Twitter client, Twhirl (I can never spell that word correctly, by the way) I decided to install the preview.

First off, why am I still using Twhirl over TweetDeck or Destroy Twitter or any number of other clients?  There are two answers: 1) Twhirl integrates with Ping.FM, a service that allows all of your social updates to populate across any number of social networks, websites, and IM statuses from one location thus saving a lot of time, and 2) Twhirl allows for multiple Twitter accounts which TweetDeck does not.  I need to see both my personal Twitter account (@pkchrisjohnson) and the Education Technology Podcast (@edtechpodcast) that I co-host.  I haven’t found another Twitter client that includes both of those features, so I have stuck with Twhirl.

Unfortunately, Seesmic Desktop does not include  support for Ping.FM like its brother Twhirl does, which is a big deal to me.  I assume, though, that Seesmic will be adding this support in the near future thus porting over the feature from Twhirl.  Seesmic Desktop does support multiple accounts, and it does so in a more efficient manner than Twhirl does, docking all of the accounts into one unified window rather than seperate windows.  Seesmic desktop also has support for Facebook (TweetDeck does also) and gives a user the best of both worlds in one interface.  Seesmic combines all @replies and direct messages for all Twitter accounts into one view and color codes them based on the account through which they were received.

Seesmic Desktop is a versatile Twitter client that, even in its infancy, has proven to be a powerful tool for me.  There is a lot to like here, and I prefer the layout over that of TweetDeck.  I have enjoyed using the program as my Twitter and Facebook dashboard for the past several days and once it receives support for Ping.FM, I will probably switch to Seesmic Desktop full time.   The only other complaint that I have, and this seems to be a systemic problem with Adobe Air applications in general is that Seesmic Desktop takes up way too much memory on my system.  It is the second largest memory consumer right now, behind Firefox, always above 100Mb of system memory.  This is a problem that is present with all of the other Air Applications that I have used, and it forces me to shut down my Twitter applications when I need to do any serious work because I need that memory for the Adobe Creative Suite.  Hopefully, Adobe will work on this problem, and make the Air codebase more

Tags: Destroy Twitter, Facebook, Ping.FM, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twitter, Twitter Client