Seesmic vs Hootsuite for Twitter

For a long time I've been enamored of Seesmic's offerings of Twitter clients. I started out by using the Air application, Seesmic Desktop. I moved on to their .NET based application, Seesmic Desktop for Windows. The reason I changed was mostly because of the resources that the AIR application took up. The .NET application is much faster and takes up a lot less resources. I found Seesmic desktop for Windows a really nice app and used it for some time (it's still on my computer). But the one thing that made me switch is the portability of Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is web based, so whether I'm in my regular location, at home or on the go, my settings are EXACTLY the same.  With Seesmic I had to transport a settings file with me and install the software on each machine I was going to use it on.  With Hootsuite, since it's web based there is no need for that.  Yes I know, other apps including Seesmic have a web based client.  But Hootsuite has done a really nice job on theirs.  You can have multiple accounts, as well as multiple people tweeting with different access depending on what you want them to do.  It's like combining the best web twitter clients with something like cotweet.com.

In Hootsuite I have multiple accounts setup for twitter as well as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Foursquare.  I have many columns in each twitter account which includes lists I follow and searches.  Searches are a problem I found with Seesmic, they weren't updating correctly.  I also found that Seesmic lists didn't update correctly in their .NET client.  I reported both these problems to Seesmic, and although their team is very good, it seems they were concentrating more on mobile applications than the desktop clients.

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Twitter - Startup #9 - Twitter Clients

Everyone will tell you something different when it comes to what the best way to access twitter is. A lot depends on your personal tastes, the platform you are using (operating system) and what you want to do. Here are a couple of things I came up with to decide what twitter client to use:

• The way in which the organization has decided to use twitter
• Who is going to be tweeting, which includes how many people will tweet on the same account
• How the tweeting will be done
• The time investment which you want to put in or can put in

CoTweet (cotweet.com)

• the twitter client that is the choice of many businesses
• Web based client
• best for use when more than one person is tweeting the same account
• can schedule tweets
• uses "CoTags" to identify person tweeting (^TZ) for Tom Zucker-Scharff
• Integrates bit.ly URL shortener
• can have multiple twitter accounts
  

TweetDeck

• Stand alone Adobe Air client
• Can have multiple accounts
• Can NOT schedule tweets
• does not lend itself to multiple users
• has iphone app that syncs with it
  

Seesmic Desktop

• Stand alone Adobe Air client
• Manages multiple accounts
• Does not lend itself to multiple users
• More Media friendly
• There is a web version of the client called Seesmic Web

Twitter website (twitter.com)

• The way a majority of tweeters use twitter
• must have a browser to use in this manner
• Fewer capabilities than the stand alone apps
• While stand alones access twitter through the site's API which will work many times when the site itself isn't working, if you are using the website it must be working for you to do anything.

Peoplebrowser (peoplebrowsr.com)

• Can be either a stand alone Adobe Air app or a web app
• does many of the things other apps do

• 
  

Seesmic Desktop, an excellent multi-account twitter app

I've used a number of different applications to manage my twitter streams. I started out using Tweetdeck, but at the time it couldn't accommodate multiple accounts. It also had some other issues, which I know annoyed me at the time but seem inconsequential now. I tried a few different twitter clients including the web application of peoplebrowser. This had a lot of potential and I went on to try the air application of peoplebrowser.

For one reason or another I kept going back to Tweetdeck. Then one day I discovered Seesmic Desktop, another air application. At first I didn't like Seesmic because it lacked a bunch of things I liked about Tweetdeck. As I used Seesmic more and more I liked it more.

1. The user lists are great. Put users into a list to track them in a separate stream.
2. The searches are saved and you can have them appear in your home stream or not.
3. Multiple accounts are easy to manipulate and use with Seesmic (I currently am managing 3 twitter accounts and a facebook acct from the client)
4. Your streams get color coded so you can easily see what messages are replies, DMs, or messages posted by you.
5. You can set the application to notify you with a sound when a reply comes in (you can notify with sounds for other posts but then my computer would be beeping of the hook!)
6. Seesmic now has integrated bit.ly account information. This way you can enter the pertinent information into your setting and anytime you shorten a link it automatically sends it to your bitly account. This type of integration is true for 5 other services as well.
7. The new Beta also has autocomplete of user names - an excellent addition.

On the down side I really, really miss 4 things about tweetdeck.
1. I really liked being able to tell which tweets I had read and which I hadn't. This is not available in Seesmic unless you empty each stream once the tweets are read (you can't mark them as read) (this is available in the new version of Seesmic web)
2. The ability to click on a twitpic link and have it show up in a popup window was really nice. Seesmic opens a browser window. (inline viewing of pics and movies available in seesmic web app)
3. The way you could click on a person to get their profile was implemented better in Tweetdeck.
4. The way in which you create groups and add members to groups is nicely done in Seesmic, but the checklist method implemented in Tweetdeck is better.

If Seesmic implements the ability to check and work with following/followers lists, then I would never have to use the twitter website again.