Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur

Seesmic has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on making mobile apps for the enterprise. Will the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success?

Seesmic has gone through its fair share of changes since its 2007 launch. The company was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur as a “social video sharing” website that allowed people to post short video messages to each other. The service, despite being quite buzzed about in tech circles, failed to take off in earnest. So in 2009, Seesmic turned away from video to focus on building mobile apps for social networking. Since then, Seesmic has been best known for its Twitter client, which allows people to post messages to Twitter from their mobile phones.

But last year, Seesmic was forced to change its business model once again after Twitter announced it would be rolling out its own native mobile apps. So now Seesmic is downshifting in the consumer app space altogether to make apps aimed at businesses. As part of this new strategy, on Tuesday Seesmic is set to roll out a new Android app for accessing Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software on a mobile device. The company plans to debut iOS versions of the app in the coming weeks.

“It’s a new direction,” Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur told me in an interview Monday. He acknowledged that the company’s switch to a new business model could be a bit bumpy. “Enterprise is a higher maintenance market, and I am expecting it to be more challenging in terms of distribution. With social apps for consumers, you can go viral pretty easily.”

But Le Meur was also very quick to point out the silver lining. “The good news is, anytime you talk to a company that has 1,000 salespeople who want to use your app, the next thing they ask is how much it costs. Enterprise doesn’t like free; the fact that an app is free doesn’t reassure them, it scares them.” Seesmic is launching its Salesforce CRM Android app in free trial mode this week, but expects to eventually charge around $10 per month for it.

Switching from being dependent on one powerful platform provider (Twitter) to another (Salesforce) might seem dangerously ill-advised, especially after Seesmic was burned by Twitter’s notorious ecosystem disruption. But it makes a bit more sense when you take into account that in February Salesforce became an investor in Seesmic.

Though the enterprise market is certainly much different from the consumer space, Seesmic does have a solid benefactor on hand to help advise on its strategy — and it wouldn’t be surprising if Salesforce is on the short list of potential M&A buyers Seesmic is now hoping to attract with its latest makeover. Time will tell if the third time will finally be the charm.

Photo of Loic Le Meur courtesy of Joi Ito on Flickr.

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Based on a literal interpretation of Seesmic’s reasoning, it’s possible the application simply never became as popular on BlackBerry handsets as it is on those running other platforms. A quick check of Seesmic on the BlackBerry App World website shows a total of 516 reviews, with the average rating of 2.5 stars out of 5. But conventional wisdom dictates a developer would want to improve upon the app, not totally abandon it; unless, that is, the platform is too limiting, there isn’t much potential upside to making improvements, or both.

We’ve written before about which will be the third major mobile platform behind Google Android and Apple iOS. The jury is still out, and while there’s room for multiple mobile operating systems, there will be dominant ones that benefit from application lock-in. It’s clear that Seesmic is betting on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 system based on this move. So too are major research firms: In May, Gartner predicted Microsoft will surpass Apple for the no. 2 smartphone OS spot by 2015. Last week, IDC joined the bandwagon and said the same, mainly because of Microsoft’s new partnership with Nokia.

We won’t know for some time if such projections are accurate, but we — and the folks at Seesmic — do have access to some current worrisome statistics related to RIM. The company reported lower than expected earnings last week (after it already lowered expectations previously) and suggested a challenging year ahead. RIM introduced a new and modern operating system in QNX, used for its PlayBook, and will be transitioning its smartphone lineup to the new platform in the future. But RIM hasn’t provided a clear timetable on such a move, and its latest BlackBerry handsets appear to be delayed.

At this point, the BlackBerry operating system looks to be a legacy platform that will be a succeeded by an incompatible new platform at some unspecified future time. Device sales aren’t growing as fast as the general smartphone market, and even the company’s new tablet sales are under 500,000 total units after two months on the market. And even that number only represents the number of tablets shipped, not those sold. Again, one third-party developer dropping a platform doesn’t make a trend, but it could beginning of one, in light of the overall challenges RIM is now facing.

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Seesmic, the social-networking startup founded by French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur, today launched a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application that allows users to log in to more accounts from the app’s single dashboard, and also allows them to customize their activity streams by adding plugins from an open marketplace. Plugins that support more than 40 other related social applications and services are available at launch, including Topsy, Klout, MySpace, Formspring, Google Reader and Ning. There’s even a plugin for connecting to Zappos, the popular shoe retailer, that lets you share news of your purchases with friends.

The idea behind expanding Seesmic’s repertoire “came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn,” LeMeur writes in a blog post about the launch of the new app. “With the plugin architecture in SD2, you can easily add, remove and customize the platform to include only the services that matter to you.” Seesmic is also available for both Windows and Mac users through Microsoft Silverlight, and there are web-based and mobile versions of the app as well.

In addition to the support Seesmic Desktop already provided for Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare — along with common Twitter-based services such as Bit.ly and Twitpic — the new version includes support for plugins that offer a variety of specific features. The Foursquare Places plugin, for example, looks for Foursquare links in your activity stream and then displays information related to that place. Another provides an image thumbnail for any link that comes from Twitpic, Yfrog, Tweetphoto (now called Plixi) or any of the other popular image-sharing services. A third provides a translation of any item in your timeline using Microsoft Translator.

The marketplace will be open to any developer who wants to produce a plugin, LeMeur says, and Seesmic will work with them to implement whatever features they want. In addition to some of the services mentioned, the new desktop app will also soon incorporate a plugin for Chatter, the social media tool from Salesforce.com, which Seesmic announced support for earlier this week. LeMeur says the company was working on support for multiple networks even before Twitter bought the Tweetie iPhone app earlier this year — and made it clear it was going to compete with players in its ecosystem — but that move reinforced the need to do so (luckily, Seesmic’s name doesn’t include the word Twitter, so it didn’t have to change it, as some have).

For some time now, Seesmic has been engaged in a battle with a number of other apps and services that provide a unified dashboard for a variety of social networks — including TweetDeck, HootSuite, Echofon and others. But the plugin marketplace and the extendability it offers could put Seesmic ahead of the pack, at least for now, since it allows users to customize their activity streams in interesting ways, and effectively customize the app as well. I have been a die-hard Tweetdeck user for some time, but these new features have me thinking about switching my allegiance. My big problem now will be getting a monitor big enough to display all the tiny windows.

http://www.youtube.com/v/b2QxAJeD16c?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0

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Look is currently only available for Windows (old school!) and features the very first “powered by Twitter” logo for a third-party app through a formal contract with Twitter. Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur would not, however, disclose the terms of the agreement.

What’s very smart about how Seesmic is doing this is that brands will be able to pay for “channels” on Seesmic Look, which display their tweets and/or related topics and news, then distribute the branded software to their fans. Le Meur said this would cost a “fixed monthly fee,” waived right now for launch demos by folks such as Ellen DeGeneres, Reggie Bush, Kim Kardashian and even Time.com. You’ll notice this is the first time Le Meur is actually talking about Seesmic making money; in the past he had waved it off as a future priority.

“We know Seesmic Desktop does not fit the needs of mainstream users simply because it’s by nature complex,” Le Meur said in an email. “People who heard about Twitter for the first time watching CNN or Oprah don’t need multiple Twitter accounts support and will never know what an hashtag is, like they never have heard about trackbacks or RSS feeds and never will.” He said he hoped power users would also enjoy sitting back and watching Twitter as well.

Seesmic has raised $12 million from investors including Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

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Seesmic, known for its desktop and web-based Twitter apps, recently updated its feature-rich Seesmic for BlackBerry client, which was first released late last year. It has potential, despite several uncooperative features.

The Good

Twitter has added a few new features since we published our roundup of free BlackBerry Twitter apps, such as lists and saved searches. Seesmic includes both in its BlackBerry app.

Twitter Lists in Seesmic BlackBerry

Any saved searches you have on your Twitter account appears in the Seesmic menu, a feature not present in Ubertwitter. You can also save new searches in Seesmic, which are carried over to your Twitter account.

Seesmic BlackBerry shows saved searches

Seesmic’s search, reply and all other basic features get the job done, taking about the same time and effort as in the average BlackBerry Twitter tool. You can “Quote” someone’s tweet, which is an editable retweet, or select “RT” to automatically retweet a message without edits. Seesmic comes with picture previews in the timeline when someone links a picture using yFrog, Twitpic and tweetPhoto. However, previews appear to be limited to these three services because images from Flickr and img.ly don’t appear in the timeline.

The Bad

A video on Seesmic’s web site shows how its notifications work, which should let you know when you receive @replies and direct messages. Notifications never worked for me. To be fair, I ruled out the possibility that it was the fault of my BlackBerry Curve 8310 or my AT&T network by verifying that notifications worked in Ubertwitter — and they did.

Seesmic appears in the camera’s photo viewer menu, but sending a photo using this option did not work for me, even though it spends a long time uploading the photo. Nothing happens. No URL to the photo appears. Next, I tried posting the photo using all of the three available photo services and none worked. I even took a photo from within Seesmic and that failed, too. Again, I switched over to Ubertwitter and tested the same feature at the same time using tweetPhoto to send a photo — and it worked.

I mentioned both issues on Twitter and someone from Seesmic responded saying the features worked fine for him. I kept trying over several days and saw no change. If you have a different BlackBerry and/or network, you still might have better luck with Seesmic for BlackBerry. It’s a free app, so doesn’t cost you anything but time to try it. If all the features had worked, it’d definitely be a viable option for those seeking a feature-rich Twitter application for BlackBerrys.

Which mobile Twitter application do you use, and why?

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Tulsa, Okla.-based Ping.fm only had two employees, co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, who will keep on working on the product for Seesmic. The company had raised angel funding last year from Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito.

Seesmic has “hundreds of thousands” of daily users and more than 3.5 million app downloads to date, said CEO Loic Le Meur. With Ping.fm’s 500,000 registered users and thousands of sign-ups per day, Seesmic expects to have more than 1 million users later this year, Le Meur said. Asked how the acquisition will help Seesmic monetize, Le Meur responded, “Given our funding, we are in no rush to monetize and focus on the market share, but we will start monetizing in 2010 with both nonintrusive advertising and premium services, on the successful Evernote model.”

Seesmic’s previous acquisition, of Twitter client Twhirl, had helped the company gain a user base and add major functionality — before that it had been a video Twitter. The company has raised $12 million from investors including Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

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Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run.

Feature-rich

Seesmic for Windows has just about every bell and whistle I could ask for in a professional Twitter client, but without a lot of the unnecessary frills that I feel get thrown in with something like TweetDeck. It seems closer to Tweetie for Mac, which is still my favorite client, independent of platform concerns.

You can use multiple accounts, and customize your columns in the main window however you like. By default, your Home feed will display tweets from all the accounts you have registered with Seesmic, which is a great thing for people who use different Twitter accounts to organize the people they follow, like groups. For those who don’t, Seesmic includes support for Twitter lists, so that you can organize those you follow that way instead.

My personal favorite feature of Seesmic is how the compose window uses your first-entered account by default. That means regardless of what post I reply to, and in what stream I find it, the reply originates from my main account. This is ideal for me because it’s my primary publishing identity, while the others are mostly for monitoring.

Searches can be initiated at any time using a field intuitively placed at the top right-hand corner of the Seesmic window, but I couldn’t find any way to find trending topics. While I don’t generally have cause to check the trends, not having the ability to do so does rankle a bit.

Good-looking and Functional

This is the best-looking Twitter app I’ve seen on Windows, and possibly one of the best-looking Windows apps I’ve seen, period. Especially using a dark-tinted Windows 7 glass visual theme, it just looks designed to fit its surroundings, which is more than I can say for any AIR application.

The tabbed sidebar and light-colored stream backgrounds make it a very usable interface, in addition to helping with aesthetic effect. I would appreciate an option to turn on color-coding for @ mentions or conversations between two people you follow, but with columns designed for the purpose, I guess the Seesmic team figures that isn’t necessary.

Advanced controls for each tweet can be brought up by hovering over a user’s portrait, or by right-clicking on any individual post, so you have options in terms of replying or retweeting. You can also create user lists on the fly from anyone in your stream, or add people to existing lists, which makes it very easy to create functional groups quickly. You can even drag a user’s profile pic to the group of your choice to add them to it.

If there was a feature I’m missing most with Seesmic, it’s the ability to follow/unfollow people from within the client. It’s something I use regularly with my iPhone Twitter clients, and something I enjoy being able to do at a moment’s notice without visiting the web-based interface for Twitter.com.

Client of Choice for Windows

I won’t mince words: Seesmic’s dedicated Windows app has become my go-to software for using Twitter on a PC, even though bugs are present in the preview version. It’s just that good, and it’s not Adobe AIR. In fact, it might be reason enough for me to spend a little less time in OS X, and a little more time working in Windows 7. I’ll stress the might in that last statement, though. If you want a copy, for now you have to sign up for the Seesmic newsletter at Seesmic.com, but turnaround time for a download link seems to be less than a day for most.

Have you tried Seesmic for Windows? Let us know what you think of it below.

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I don’t generally like living on the bleeding edge, but some betas are very usable, and I’ve already incorporated them into my daily workflow. Others look promising, but are not stable or are lacking too many features right now. But all of the following are worth trying, and watching as they develop. We’ll review them more thoroughly as they mature.

Adium is my favorite IM client for the Mac OS. Its latest beta supports all of the instant messaging protocols, and also has rudimentary support for Twitter and Facebook Chat. Unfortunately, the latter is not working as I write this, although a fix is expected shortly.

VoxOx is an ambitious program combining IM; social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. As I wrote a few days ago, it is very rough around the edges now, and desperately needs improved tools for managing contacts.

Imo.im is a web-based multi-system instant messaging client with some intriguing features, like shared whiteboards. This service is listed as being in alpha, so we can assume that it has considerable development ahead of it.

Brizzly is a web-based service that looks a lot like Twitter’s own web interface, but with improvements. It supports multiple Twitter accounts and has recently added Facebook support. The multiple accounts aren’t as well integrated as I would like, but I assume that will come.

Tweetminer is another web-based service that includes support for multiple Twitter accounts, tweet scheduling, and RSS feeds. Its interface is attractive, but features are minimal at the moment. There are also Adobe AIR or Fluid-based desktop versions, for those who prefer standalone apps.

Socialite (formerly EventBox, which Imran wrote about here) has just released beta 2, which seemingly broke support for Facebook updates. When this issue is fixed, Socialite could become my favorite, as it combines support for Facebook, Facebook Pages, multiple Twitter accounts, RSS feeds and Google Reader in one attractive interface.

Seesmic Desktop is another Twitter and Facebook program which has worked well for me, but it shares with many Adobe AIR programs some ugly screen fonts and a propensity for using large amounts of memory. Seesmic also has a promising web version, but so far, it lacks support for multiple Twitter accounts, and for Facebook.

Nambu only does Twitter, but does it very well, in what I think is the most attractive interface of any program of its type. I can choose three different layouts, and switch between them easily. Nambu’s development is very rapid, with a new beta released every couple of days.

I find the popular Tweetdeck to be totally unreadable and unusable, due to its AIR interface. I wish Adobe would make AIR on the Mac look as good as the native OS X fonts and windows.

There are lots more betas out there, of course. What beta software and services do you use?

Image credit: Stock.xchng user OmirOnia

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It turns out that there have been widespread complaints about this issue, which Facebook has acknowledged on its Help page:

“Site Maintenance” error
Some users have experienced difficulty logging in to and using the site for several days, receiving “Site Maintenance” error messages after logging in. We are aware of this technical issue and are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologize for the delay.

I was lucky, and was able to get back into the Facebook site fairly quickly. While I was locked out, I couldn’t post to my personal Facebook page, but fortunately I could use some Facebook functions because I’d set up RSS feeds and access via third-party programs in advance.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to be discouraging RSS feeds for Notifications (messages like “Jane Doe has commented on your link”), so you may not be able to follow the RSS instructions given in the Facebook Help. Status Updates (like “Jane Doe is ready for a long weekend”) can be accessed via a Facebook application that creates an RSS feed for your status updates.

If you administer any Facebook Groups and Pages, these should be unaffected by log-in failures. So make sure that you give a friend administrative rights to your group or page. If their accounts are not affected, they can post material for you. You should also be able to post to Facebook Pages (but not Groups) via third-party programs such as Ping.fm and Seesmic Desktop, if you set up these programs with posting rights ahead of time.

It’s frustrating when you can’t log into the Facebook site, but you may be able to do more than you expect. Let’s hope that while Facebook is having log-in issues, it allows easier access to our data through RSS and third-party programs.

How do you manage when you can’t log into Facebook?

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