Not to be overshadowed by AlertThingy’s announcement earlier today, Seesmic founder — Twhirl owner — Loic Le Meur let us know that his desktop notifications client is also getting a substantial upgrade today.
Twhirl doesn’t support as many services as AlertThingy but Le Meur points out that it’s much more popular. It’s also the only desktop client in its class that supports his video messaging system Seesmic, which is no surprise since Seesmic aquired Twhirl last April.
Until today, users could only play video clips through Twhirl from the people they follow on Seesmic. But now with version 0.9, Seesmic users can record and post video clips from within Twhirl as well, bringing the construction of a Seesmic desktop client to completion.
Le Meur says that creating the right API to record and post video comments from within Twhirl took a lot of work, and naturally he’d like to see the other desktop notification tools pick up Seesmic support as well. So all of the recording functionality is now part of the APIs that Seesmic has already provided publicly. No desktop clients have used it to retrieve or post clips yet, but the web services Ping.fm and DailyMile have both added Seesmic video recording as features already.
There’s a variety of other improvements in this release, which you can read about in Le Meur’s official post on the announcement. Among them is new support for Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Ping.fm.
Le Meur says that Twhirl has about 150,000 active users, about three times the number of those who use Seesmic regularly. The client has been downloaded about 700,000 times and about 10,000 people sign into Seesmic each day.
Disclaimer: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic, although I am not.