Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic is now in it’s second iteration and I’m starting to get questions about it.

I’ll be right up front and say that for me the Gold Standard is still TweetDeck, but if Seesmic had just one more feature then I’d switch.

Seesmic is a stand-alone desktop UI for Twitter. If you are serious about using Twitter as a business tool then you need to use something that make you much more productive and organized than your web browser.

Like TweetDeck, Seesmic organizes things into columns. You can stretch Seesmic across your screen and see multiple columns or you can shrink it down so that only one column is visible. In one-column mode, clicking on the labels in the sidebar selects the contents of the single column.

It gets confusing though when you are somewhere in between. Lets say I have three columns: Home, Replies, and a Search. If I stretch the window out so all three columns are exposed I must them go through a series of clicks in order to display them all simultaneously. Then when I want to shrink Seesmic back down to a single column some button clicking is required to collapse the columns and make them once again respond to clicks in the sidebar. TweetDeck is much easier in this regard. All I have to do is to grab TweetDeck’s resize handle and change the size of the window.

I don’t like the fact that many of Seesmic’s buttons are missing tooltips. Some are there but enough are missing that it is aggravating to hover your mouse over a button and wait several seconds before you realize that you’ll have to look elsewhere to find out what that button does.

My main gripe about Seesmic (and this is the show-stopper) is the way you populate groups (called userlists). You have to wait until the desired individual shows up in one of your other columns then click on the approriate button that appears when you mouse over the individual’s photo. Being able to add people to a group this way is great (You can do it this way in TweetDeck too) but for this to be the only way to populate my groups sucks. Until Seesmic fixes this I’m sticking with TweetDeck.

On the other hand, Seesmic has one huge advantage over TweetDeck: support for multiple personas (accounts). If you need to tweet from multiple Twitter accounts then TweetDeck then isn’t very useful. (If TweetDeck adds just that one feature then the only way you’ll get me to switch is to pry it from my cold dead fingers.)

Another thing that has become aggravating about Seesmic after living with it for a few hours: Every operation seems to require one or two more mouse-clicks than it does on TweetDeck. For example, To create a tiny url, I must first click the ‘add a URL’ icon to pop up the window containing the url field. In TweetDeck it’s always there. Seesmic takes one more mouse-click. I suppose that if you are from the Nintendo generation then all that extra clicking makes Seesmic more game-like but to me it means that each interaction with Seesmic take more time. Business owners have businesses to run – they want to minimize the amount of unnecessary time spent.

And one final thing: even in single-column mode, Seesmic occupies more screen space than TweetDeck. When operating with a 15-inch laptop screen that is an important consideration.