Today I’m going to talk about my personal experience in using Seesmic Desktop for tweeting. I’ve also published 2 posts on tweeting with TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter a few weeks earlier.
Seesmic Desktop is another Adobe Air application that you can use as a replacement for tweeting via the web interface. It can also display Facebook updates so if you are looking for an application that both works for Twitter and Facebook, Seesmic Desktop is the man.
Does Seesmic Desktop give a good experience? Let’s see.
Seesmic Desktop Overview
based on Seesmic Desktop 0.4.
Seesmic Desktop can occupy your entire screen, if you want it. You can maximize the window and it actually fits nicely on a widescreen monitor. You can fully customize which information column to display (Private messages, Replies, etc) on Seesmic Desktop. Each column can be fixed or resized individually, depending on the option that is accessible at the bottom left corner of the application.
I actually like how Seesmic Desktop makes use of your Widescreen monitor nicely because you can basically view all information on the same screen. The wider your monitor is, the more information you can see at once on the same screen.
If you have more than 1 Twitter Account, you can set it up on Seesmic Desktop settings and switch between them easily. Unfortunately since I only have 1 Twitter account (which is more than enough for me), I haven’t tried this feature yet so I can’t give any comment on this. However I think Seesmic Desktop is the only Twitter Application that supports multiple Twitter accounts.
You can also assign a group (called the “USERLISTS”) and then add friends on a particular userlist. This way, it’s easier to see twitter updates on your closest friends or from a particular group that you want to keep following. It’s not easy unfortunately to add users into your userlists. You need to click on the avatar (the display profile photo) of a user to add him/her to one of your userlist.
You can also add the users by searching (type in their Twitter profile name) and then adding them to the userlist using the method I described earlier. I wish Seesmic Desktop has an easier way to add your friends to the userlists though.
You can also use the same interface (by clicking on the display profile) to do a retweet, send a direct message to the user, and other basic tweeting.
Notifications of new updates can be seen on the bottom right corner of your system tray nicely (with sounds). Of course, if you are feeling annoyed, you can turn these notifications off from the settings.
One thing that I hate about this alert is how I see this every time I start my Seesmic Desktop application:
For some reason, my private messages (messages sent directly towards me on Twitter) remain unread no matter how many times I’ve closed and re-opened Seesmic Desktop. There doesn’t seem to be a way to mark these messages as “Read” either.
Seesmic Desktop also looks a bit bland and there’s nothing you can do about that. There are no themes or colors settings whatsoever.
Seesmic Desktop Pros
+ Support multiple Twitter accounts
+ Support Facebook updates
+ Can assign userlists (or groups)
+ Good Widescreen Monitor support
+ Has what you need on a Twitter application (retweet, replies, etc)
+ What you see on the screen is fully customizable
+ Easy to use
Seesmic Desktop Cons
– No themes or colors settings
– The annoying “X private messages” every time I start the application
– No easy way to add a user into a userlist
– No threaded conversation
Seesmic Desktop Official site.
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