Today, Seesmic is making things even more interesting. We've known for awhile that they've been working on an iPhone app, but now they're also introducing a brand new Twitter product — Seesmic for the web. In a full rebranding effort, Twitter (not video) has become the core of Seesmic's business model, and they're pushing out the web-based Twitter app along with an update to Seesmic Desktop to support the new vision.
Seesmic: A Web-based Twitter App
The new Seesmic is a first release web-based Twitter app that currently only supports one account, but it comes loaded with saved searches, a beautiful single column mode that functions like an email program, unlimited columns, messages tab for a conversation view of direct messages (a must see), quick rollover view of a Twitter user stats with follow/unfollow options, and a complete profile view of Twitterers. Clearly Seesmic has managed to bring some of the best features of their desktop app to the web, throw a few new goodies in, and create something easy to use and incredibly functional regardless of the computer you're using.
What we especially love is the single column view of tweets, and the ability to create the same condensed view of tweets per column in the multi-column view. This email-like appearance provides a fantastic way to process incoming tweets at lightening speed, without stripping out necessary functionality. In fact, we think you'll get a kick out of the fact that should you want to retweet, reply, direct message, or report spam, all you need to do is select the tweet in question, and you're able to perform each of those activities inline (as if you were responding to an email message).
The Seesmic web app you're seeing today is likely to be altered and updated significantly, in much the same way that the first release of Seesmic Desktop has evolved over the past few months. According to CEO Loic Le Meur, we can expect Seesmic web to support groups (userlists) and sync between the web and desktop app in the very near future. They've actually already laid the foundation for sync by allowing members to create a Seesmic account via the web app. We expect this to function similar to TweetDeck's sync between web and mobile, with your Seesmic account - with saved searches, userlists, and accounts - becoming something universally accessible regardless of your platform.
Seesmic Desktop: What's New
Fans of the desktop application will also be happy to learn that Seesmic's just released version 0.4, which now includes some of the goodies you've always wanted. Most notably is the different view options, which lets you not only operate in a single column mode similar to Twhirl, but also completely hide the sidebar for a very compact but robust Twitter desktop app experience. The collapsed sidebar still shows minimized buttons with tooltips, so you can still toggle between accounts, userlists, and searches as needed.
It might seem a little tricky, but should you select the detached columns mode (from the bottom left-hand corner), all of your items — searches, replies, dms, etc — in the left-hand sidebar become detached columns and you can resize the fixed width for columns as you wish (resizing works in combined mode as well). You'll have to experiment with each mode (single, detached, and combined) to find the right view for your Twitter stream, but with the new choices, you now have complete control over your view of the stream.
Some other notable changes include internal and external app improvements to make the app less CPU intensive and give you more control over the quantity of tweets in your timeline. Overall, the app looks and runs even better than before.
What's Next: Seesmic Everywhere