It looks like our move into the browser is by now inescapable, as more and more applications are moving to the web. For me, a major milestone was reached about a month ago, when I moved my work e-mail account to Google Apps, where it now lives together with the rest of my e-mail accounts. Of all my desktop apps that see heavy daily use, the next in the list to be migrated is my Twitter client. Let’s take a quick look at three alternatives:
Seesmic
Seesmic Web is the latest product from Loic le Meur and his team. The brand Seesmic was originally a video sharing app, often described as “Twitter for video”. Loic, however, was very quick to realize where things were going in this space, and acquired a popular desktop Twitter client called Twhirl. Twhirl, in its turn, was morphed in Seesmic Desktop, a more robust desktop app, also based on Adobe Air. So, as it stands today, all three Seesmic products still exist, but the clear focus today is on the desktop and web Twitter clients.
Seesmic's dashboard
The web app itself closely resembles the desktop client, and those familiar with desktop apps like Seesmic or Tweetdeck will quickly feel at home. The interface is very responsive, and its familiar multi-column layout is immensely flexible. If you’ve ever used Seesmic for the desktop or Tweetdeck, this one is for you. Seesmic Web now features live link previews (from bit.ly), and is available in a number of languages, being the only client available in a number of languages. The major missing feature is lack of support for multiple accounts – this is the one feature that is missing from the web version that stops me from migrating full time.
I am referring to Seesmic as a Twitter client because we are describing here the web version. The desktop app, however, already boasts a number of Facebook integration features, and is quickly heading towards being a “Social Media client”, or whatever name someone will come up with for this sort of application. Even though it is natural to assume the web version will head that way, so far it is not there yet, working only as a regular Twitter client. I should also point out that I am a regular Seesmic user, and have in fact contributed to its translation to Brazilian Portuguese.
Cotweet
Cotweet is a tool aimed for corporate use, but even so it is a nice way for a single person to manage multiple accounts. Its focal use case is for many people managing a single Twitter account, and for that Cotweet brings the concept of being “On duty” for a certain account. Whoever is on duty is notified of any messages the account receives, and messages can be assigned to other people for them to respond to. You can also assign messages for other people to respond to.
Cotweet's dashboard
Cotweet has a very nice user interface, showing details about users and bit.ly links on the right sidebar. When attempting to use this as an individual though, it becomes clear that Cotweet is not meant for this. We use it regularly at work for two accounts we handle and it works great, but for my own accounts, I’d stick with something else.
Brizzly
Brizzly is still in closed beta, but it does look really promising, with a clean, uncluttered interface that has a lot of carefully considered functionality. Brizzly is fully geared toward the individual user. It is very easy to create groups, direct messages are shown in a convenient box to th eright of the main message stream, links are shown expanded (something that we are seeing in a lot of places now) and images are shown inline with your tweets.
Brizzly's main view
Brizzly also has some new friendly features, such as a box displaying current trending topics on Twitter and short texts explaining why those items are currently trending. Overall, Brizzly is very clean and friendly, and should appeal to a lot of people.
Overall, I’d go with Seesmic for a well rounded offer with a familiar interface – but for that to happen, it needs to catch up to the desktop app in some areas, in particular multiple account management. Brizzly is an extremely strong contender, with a very nice interface and a fresh take on how to manage multiple accounts, avoiding the “default”multi-column layout.
Sliderocket, the online presentation tool, has today come out of private beta and is now public, open to all. If you did not get in to the private round, you’ve got to check this out now. Sliderocket is one of the most fantastic web apps out there. It has features that help you create stunning presentations very easily, and is organized in a collaborative way that would work really well for a small business, or perhaps for a department that relies on frequently creating presentations with shared assets (images, templates, videos…) such as a sales or marketing department. With the opening to the public, comes a new release with some interesting new collaboration features. Still sorely missing is a feature to export files to common presentation formats such as .odf or .ppt.
If you still haven’t tried Sliderocket, now is the time to give it a go, this is definetly one of the new web tools worth trying.
Just heard through Twitter that Twhirl, my (and most everyone’s) favorite Twitter client, has added support for identi.ca in a still unreleased beta version. identi.ca, for those who haven’t heard about it, is a Twitter clone that is based on the Laconica open source microblogging platform, which allows anyone with access to a web server to host their own microblogging platform à la Twitter. Even though the release is still marked as beta, you can get it over here. You must also register your IM address with identi.ca and add the identi.ca user as your IM buddy in order to get XMPP notifications to work.
So what’s the big fuss? Well, XMPP notifications is what a lot of people have been expecting Twitter to deliver more widely for a long time – at the moment, only a select few partners (including Summize, which they bought onyl a few days ago) have access to this feed. Twhirl has had support for XMPP for a while now, but it’s been pretty useless as their main platform does not openly support it. I guess it’s a good test for Twhirl, to get some public use of this function so it’s ready when Twitter opens up.
Are you on identi.ca? Subscribe to me, let’s see how this works!
Sorry about that, I’ve just switched jobs, and as usual it takes a while to fall into the new schedule – so the blog suffers. Should get back to a steady rythm sometime soon.
Polar Rose, a facial recognition based search engine that allows you to find photos of people by their name, is getting ready to enter public beta. Yesterday I received an e-mail from them with my invite (at last, I was subscribed since around November 2006!), and their blog states that they have a “public beta coming up“.
Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in Sweden, where they are based. After their model gets good enough, Polar Rose is then able to automatically recognise who a face belongs to. It is even capable of recognizing all the people in a photo – searching for someone on the website tells you who they’ve been seen with lately (Barack Obama was seen with Rev. Jeremiah Wright much more than with Hillary Clinton, for instance).
Polar Rose seems to work great, but to become efficient it needs a lot of people tagging photos, and right now I don’t see much of an incentive to do that. Yes, I am using the plugin, but then I wil try out just about anything new that I can come across on the ‘net, which is not something you can expect most people to do. The technology itself is great, but right now they need to work on engaging users to build their index. And hey, if you want to get the web celebrities happy about you, then you really should recognize Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble (see the screenshot)
Read it at Andrew Dobrow’s blog: as a protest against Twitter’s continuing availability issues, he sugests people take o while day off Twitter. I’m all for it, definitely. Even if I’m not one of the biggest Twitter users out there, I do really enjoy it – it’s just a pity that I live so far from civilization… And as Andrew himself said it, this is happening precisely because people like Twitter so much, and it’s not just about being ungrateful. And I would add the following sugestion to the discussion: not only spend a day without Twitter, but switch over to Pownce for that day. Pownce actually has better features thatn Twitter while still keeping things very simple. The folks at Twitter might be better motivated to sort out their issues if they become afraid of losing users to the competition. The day is May 21st, next Wednesday, so add that to your GCal, Remember The Milk, or wherever you keep you notes and appointments. {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/IGdiTGCRsX_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Twit-out: a full day without Twitter (and with Pownce?) ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/xZZHyZ7pT4″}}}
Less than two months after moving to our new home at Webfaction and activating Akismet on the blog (previously I used Spam Karma), Akismet today reports that it has caught an astonishing 1000 comment spams. Considering this count starts on March 19th, and that the blog has very little traffic, this is quite astonishing, isn’t it? According to Google Analytics, I haven’t even had that same number of pageviews ever since I started tracking the blog… Where will this end? And I wonder what it’s like for the very large blogs, how much spam they must surely get. Any of you A-listers reading care to comment ?
[UPDATE] Problogger’s Darren Rowse replied through Twitter, and it’s ridiculous: he’s had 3,911,810 comments blocked so far in one of his blogs!
Just a quick note to those who use Google Desktop for WIndows: it eats up hard drive space like nothing I’ve seen! I ran out of disk space on my system partition yesterday while running a large video convertion task, and after some searching I found the culprit – Google Desktop creates an entirely different index for each user in your machine. I use my laptop in different customer’s networks (and different AD domains), so I have about five user accounts in my machine. Each index was taking up about 2 GB. In my 30 GB system partition, you can see how that will quickly show up… So a word of warning, if it feels like you should have more disk space than you do, check out your Google Desktop index at C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop.
Saw this one over at FriendFeed Watch: the first desktop client for FriendFeed was released! I was looking forward to this, as FriendFeed is such a nice and well implemented idea that justs begs to become a permanent resident of my system tray, rather than having to keep a browser tab permanently open to check on it. The client is called bTittleTattle (yea, don’t ask), and it was made by the guys at Sobees. It is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation so, unfortunately, Windows only forever Check out the video below to see what it looks like.
I basically didn’t like it at all, and that seems to be the same opinion over at FriendFeedWatch. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the rumoured Air client get released. Its future website still shows a “Under construction” page.
[UPDATE]: Less than twelve hours after my post, there is a new version out. In this new version, I found three different themes, which I must say I did not see in the original version, so I’m not sure if they were already there or not. And now, we can get rid if the bee! With a different theme, the app becomes much more usable, the only important thing still missing is minimize to tray. Take a look at the grey theme in the screenshot. And François, thanks for your attention
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Check out the video below to see what it looks like.
