Review: Seesmic For iPhone

Good news - the Seesmic for iPhone app is finally available (iTunes download - it's free). I like it. Pros: It's free. It's clean, runs very quickly, and the interface is intuitive and easy-to-use. Includes native and traditional retweet support (including via), which is a huge plus. Support for your own bit.ly credentials. It's very Tweetie-like. This is a good thing, but the timing of this release is unfortunate given Twitter's official successor to Tweetie, Twitter for iPhone, also came out this week. It might be a little too like Tweetie to gain a lot of market share, especially as both apps are free. The Seesmic app supports Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm. I've never been hugely bothered about having an 'all in one' aggregator for my mobile or desktop social media client - if I'm using Twitter, I'd rather the client focused its attention and resources 100 per cent on that - but the Facebook implementation here is efficient and handy if all you want is a quick look at your news feed. I don't use Ping.fm so can't comment there. Supports multiple accounts, and also cross-posting (something which I don't like to see but others disagree). Evernote support. I only have a couple of immediate issues. One, when you close the app and re-open it, it doesn't remember exactly where you were. It knows that you were in Facebook or Twitter, and puts you back there, but on the latter it always starts on the home feed, and not where you left it (i.e., replies or in a list). This is something Tweetie does very well, and it's a small but niggling oversight. My second concern is from a marketing perspective. When you submit a tweet using the Seesmic iPhone app, it's labelled simply 'Seesmic'. For me, I would expect (and prefer) to see 'Seesmic for iPhone', and for Seesmic, I would think they would want to do this to benefit from the marketing exposure. Maybe I'm unusual, but when I see new clients in tweet information, I always check them out. As it is now, the vast majority of users will see 'Seesmic' and think nothing has changed. There's an opportunity for growth there that I think might have been overlooked. (You can suggest improvements and tweaks through a special feedback page that Seesmic has started.) Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur (@loic) has recorded his usual enthusiastic video: Overall, this is recommended. It's not quite as slick as Tweetie/Twitter for iPhone, but there are a couple of extras here that should have some appeal, notably the support for old-style retweets and the Facebook implementation.

Social Pro Daily

Review: Seesmic For iPhone

Shea Bennett

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Shea Bennett