All the social media news right now seems to be about the New Twitter features. I just want to take a moment away from that to say that I’ve now started using the new Seesmic Desktop 2 app on my Mac, for my desktop social networking needs. So far, I’m impressed with it, enough to keep using it on a daily basis.
It has to be said that I do still visit the individual social network web interfaces on a regular basis, but I’m finding that there are some really useful aspects to the new Seesmic Desktop version.
I’ll spare you the full rundown of features as that’s been well covered elsewhere, but here are the main reasons why I’m liking using it a lot. I have been a user of Seesmic Desktop since the beginning; well, from even before Seesmic bought the Twhirl desktop Twitter client and developed the app into what it is today.
- One change that I wasn’t sure about, especially running on a Mac, is that the new version uses Microsoft Silverlight platform, rather than the previous Adobe Air. I needn’t have worried about that. It’s seems to run okay, no problems there.
- I really like the ability to be able to post and view messages from numerous social networks in the one tidy interface. The usual timelines I have open at one time are: Twitter (2 different accounts), Facebook, Linkedin, Google Buzz and Foursquare. This does of course take up a whole monitor in screen real estate but it’s very useful to have them all in the same place.
- It’s more than a little useful to be able to select any number of services to post any new message to, without using a service such as Ping (which is also included as one of the accounts by the way).
- There’s a full set of features available for each network. For instance, for Twitter accounts it’s possible to view favourites, send DMs, reply, reply all, follow, unfollow, block/report spam, retweet, quote, favorite a tweet, add to Twitter Lists, copy messages and translate.
- I like the ability to be able to add my bit.ly account API key to the app, so I can track data on shortened links I post to the various services.
- I like the addition of the Seesmic Desktop 2 Plugin Marketplace, which will no doubt be added to over the coming months. There are already some interesting plugins in there. For instance, when you add the Klout plugin, every tweet in your Twitter timeline displays the Klout score of that tweeter.
Okay that’s it. As I said, there are many more features but those are the ones that make it worth using for me. Have you tried it yet? What are your thoughts on it?
