Does Seesmic For iPhone Stack Up Against TweetDeck And Twitter For iPhone?

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Seesmic, Twitter and the iPhone have all been around for a couple of years, but for whatever reason it took a while for French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur‘s latest venture to come out with a proper iPhone / iPod touch application.

As of this morning, it’s here, and it’s … great.

The application, which you can download from iTunes via this link, lets users manage their Twitter and Facebook accounts and update other social networks through Ping.fm integration (Seesmic acquired the company behind that service earlier this year).

I’ll let you read the blog post and watch the video embedded below for more details about the Seesmic for iPhone app, but I think people will be interested to see how it stacks up against Twitter for iPhone (which was also released this week and is the latest iteration of Atebits’ Tweetie app) and TweetDeck.

The short version: if you’re a fan of the latter clients, there’s a good chance you will not be compelled to make the switch. If you’re not and you find yourself constantly wondering which is the best between those two, Seesmic for iPhone is simply a really great third alternative.

And if you haven’t tried any of them, I’d recommend you start out with Seesmic.

Seesmic for iPhone is free, fast, smooth, and complete. The built-in Twitter client is well-designed and has all the functionality you’ve come to expect (timeline, replies, direct messages, geolocation support for new tweets, the ability to add photos, retweets, multiple accounts support, search, trending topics, lists, favorites, URL shortening and so on). But so do TweetDeck and Twitter for iPhone, of course.

But Twitter for iPhone only supports the ‘new’ type of retweeting, and doesn’t give you an easy shortcut for old-school retweeting, aka ‘quoting’ (you can, but it’s cumbersome). And Twitter for iPhone obviously doesn’t have built-in support for Facebook. TweetDeck does, but neither support the many other social networks users can easily update with Seesmic for iPhone (again, thanks to Ping.fm integration).

Granted, you can use dedicated apps for Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., but for basic usage it’s simply a huge time-saver to be able to do all that from a single app.

Seesmic for iPhone also lets you save important messages and updates by storing them to Evernote in one tap, which is a very nice added bonus.

All this basically means Seesmic for iPhone is a worthy competitor to all the other apps when it comes to managing and updating your Twitter account, but definitely outshines both in terms of support for multiple social networking and other services – which makes Seesmic for iPhone stand on its own two feet as a very potent social hub rather than a mere ‘Twitter client’.

Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Company: Seesmic
Website: seesmic.com
Launch Date: June 1, 2007
Funding: $16M

Seesmic is a powerful suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide businesses and individuals with everything they need to build and manage their brands online. With applications on every platform, including mobile devices, and a marketplace of over 80 third-party plugins, Seesmic is the most comprehensive solution on the market. Seesmic is headquartered in San Francisco and was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur.

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Product: iPhone 3GS
Company Apple

The iPhone 3GS, announced at WWDC on June 8, 2009, is a faster iPhone featuring a 3.0 megapixel camera with autofocus, video recording capabilities with editing, and increased (3X) processing speed. The 3GS is available in 16GB and 32GB, for $199 and $299, respectively. Other new features include: Digital Compass Cut, Copy, and Paste MMS (release delayed in the US) WiFi tethering (release delayed in the US) Voice Control Landscape Keyboard Spotlight Search Voice Memos

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