After reading Chris Brogan’s blog entry on Aug 12, titled My Twitter Presence, I realized that there were better tools for keeping track of Twitter and other Social Media than what I was currently using.
So, I took his advice and installed Seesmic Desktop. I’m not a hardcore tweeter by any means, but I wanted a tool that allowed me to more easily track when someone mentions my company, @farreach, or me, @cfeldmann. The tool I had been using allowed me to create a search tab, but that had proved not to be sufficient. Basically, I wanted a folder that had all the mentions in it, which is just what Seesmic offers.
Seesmic Desktop is a Silverlight Out-of-Browser application, which is a platform we at Far Reach utilize when appropriate and want to support. Silverlight is a development platform that allows for the creation of rich Internet applications that act more like desktop apps, but can run in a web browser. In this case, the fact that Seesmic Desktop runs Out-of-Browser means it runs outside of a browser window as an independent application on your desktop. What are the benefits of that? For me as a web developer (which means I generally have a lot of browser windows open), it means I don’t have to keep track of which browser my twitter tool is running in. Since Seesmic runs Out-of-Browser, I see it as an icon in my taskbar and I can get to it with a simple mouse click. Additionally, if Internet Explorer or Firefox dies, which occurs way too often, I don’t have to sign back into Seesmic.
The only shortcoming I’ve discovered is that Seesmic Desktop does not allow you to add your LinkedIn account. However, they expect to include this in an upcoming release. Sweet! In addition to the Desktop and web versions, they also have mobile versions for the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
So, give Seesmic a try. And, if you’re using a different tool you really like, please let me know. However, if it’s a desktop version, only tell me about it if it’s built in Silverlight.