• 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.

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.

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!

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)

[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!

{seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/6D8EqAyEzd_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”New Seesmic plugin activated! ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/rOfbOCncq7″}}}

Seesmic just gets better every day.

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