Another complaint…
So I use Twitter a lot. More than any other “social” tool out there. As such as I have used just about anything under the sun to connect with the quirky little web site that gained so much mainstream traction as of late. Many of the third party applications to get my 140-character-or-less micro-blog posts out to the world are actually much better than anything Twitter came up with themselves. Biz (the guy that invented Twitter) and his team encourage this. Great! While they are working on a robust back-end (with varying success) others write software that hooks into it, making the experience, pretty cool.
The latest of these offerings is Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic is the social video web site of French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur (yes that rhymes — sorta) operating out of SF. They have now created an application that can tap into Twitter. I don’t quite get it (well I do but more about that later), there are already hundreds of very capable Twitter apps. For the web, for Adobe Air, Java, cell phones, hell I even rolled my own once.
In it’s current incarnation Seesmic Desktop is fairly unruly. OK, to be fair, it is a preview release, nothing is set in stone yet, but why on earth release an app that is so far from being done? Remember I said, in the last paragraph (and in parentheses) that I do actually get it? A while ago, Seesmic aquired Twhirl, a cute little Twitter “also ran” on the Adobe AIR platform. And now, they have released (after all but halting development on Twhirl) a “twitter client” that looks a little bit too much, exactly like….
Tweetdeck! The Seesmic Desktop is an almost perfect clone of the “best seller Tweetdeck. You know what that reminds me of? Microsoft! Remember the Mac, and then there was Windows? Remember Netscape, and then there was Internet Explorer? Remember Tweetdeck and then there was Seesmic Desktop?
SD (Seesmic Desktop) is an almost perfect (if not somewhat clunkstery) clone of TD (Tweetdeck). I predict the following: While TD has built in support for for TwitPic (a photo sharing service for Twitter) and TD has built in support for 12seconds (a video sharing site), SD is going to have built in support for TwitPic and…. Seesmic (hey, guess what? A video sharing shite). Seesmic will not allow any other client app (such as TD) access to their API, in order to control their proprietary video share, hoping to squash the competition and brute forcing their way into a market currently dominated by the underdog.
Loic is going to be to Tweetdeck what Bill was to Netscape. If I was the Tweetdeck guys I would seriously start talking to Vimeo…. Right Now!!