Social application developer Seesmic is making a big move into the social enterprise and is debuting a dedicated Android app and iPad app for Salesforce’s CRM product (Windows Phone 7 will also be added soon), called Seesmic CRM. The Android app will be launched tomorrow morning at Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, and Seesmic will launch the iPad app in a few weeks.

For background, Seesmic, which was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, helps you monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The bonus of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others.

But of late, Seesmic has been dabbling in the enterprise and launching more business-focused features. Last Fall, Seesmic launched a deep integration with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise, Chatter. And then earlier this year, Salesforce led a $4 million round in Seesmic.

Basically the Seesmic CRM Android and iPad apps bring all the functionality of Salesforce’s CRM to mobile phones. Users can search their Salesforce.com account from the native apps; look up leads, contacts, accounts, related activities and chatter newsfeeds on the go; create and update leads, contacts, tasks, and events; log calls and emails after meetings; and much more. And the apps leverage the mobile OS; allowing users to see maps of their leads respective to their current location; upload photos and more. While pricing hasn’t been announced yet, Seesmic may charge $10 per month per user for the apps.

Le Meur tells us that he isn’t competing with Salesforce because the CRM giant currently doesn’t offer in-depth Android and iPad apps. In fact, Seesmic has been working ‘hand in hand’ with Salesforce’s mobile team to develop these native apps. And Salesforce is particularly bullish on the social enterprise of late—’Welcome To The Social Enterprise’ is the theme of Dreamforce this year. As Le Meur says, “We are working with Salesforce, not competing with the company.”

Of course, it is interesting that a Twitter-platform developer is shifting focus away from building for the consumer and focusing on the enterprise. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services.

Thus, Seesmic has found a new user base in businesses. Le Meur explains that bringing mobile and social to the enterprise is the future for Seesmic. While the startup won’t give up its web and mobile apps (the company’s Android app has over a million users); all of Seesmic efforts are now fully ‘focused on bringing social to business users,’ says Le Meur.

Seesmic also shuttered its BlackBerry app a few months ago. You can watch Le Meur’s recent conversation with TechCrunch TV’s Andrew Keene here.

(Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was an early investor in Seesmic.)

The pivot, of course, is the thing these days. And Le Meur – perhaps because of his skill as a wind surfer – is a master of sniffing changes in the business environment before anyone else. In contrast with Catarina Fake and Philip Kaplan, Le Meur is strongly opposed to what the calls “the disposable start-up.” For him, he has a moral obligation to his investors at Seesmic (which include Mike Arrington) to adapt the company to the new environment – even if that sometimes means transforming the company into something unrecognizable from its previous incarnation.

So is monsieur Pivot right – is the “disposable company” immoral?

This is the second part of a two part interview with Le Meur. Yesterday, he explained why European start-up entrepreneurs have nothing to learn from their European counterparts. That post sparked a sharp rebuke from TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher. And Loic responded himself in the original post comments.

Why entrepreneurs who don’t adapt, die

Seesmic’s new CRM business model

On the immorality of the “disposable startup”

Europeans, on the other hand, have much to learn from American entrepreneurs. Most of all, Loic insists, European start-up entrepreneurs need to think globally and to stop copying American innovation. “DO NOT COPY”, Loic advises the Europeans – although this doesn’t stretch to intellectual property where he sees European media executives locked in the archaic business model of protecting traditional content.

This is the first part of a two part interview with Le Meur. Check back tomorrow to hear Loic defend his record as Seesmic CEO.

Loic to Europe: “Do Not Copy”

Why Le Web is a global, rather than European, event

Why Europe must wake up and protect the future

The popular UberSocial Twitter client for BlackBerry (formerly known as UberTwitter) just got an update with a bunch of new features and bug fixes.

Notably, its developer UberMedia is doubling down on its BlackBerry app around the same time one of its rivals, Seesmic, is abandoning the BlackBerry platform.

One of the new features in UberSocial for Blackberry 1.2 is called “Inner Circle”, which basically lets you group together the most important people you follow in an exclusive timeline, alongside the traditional timeline.

Users can also set up special notifications for tweets, replies or direct messages from anyone in their ‘Inner Circle’.

Additional new features include ‘Theme Engine’, which enables the creation of personalized themes and ‘Deal Box’, which allows users to get notifications for location-based deals.

With the upgraded app, UberMedia is also meeting Twitter’s requirements with regards to OAuth authentication. Users who do not upgrade to the new version by June 30 will no longer be able to access their direct messages.

For the record: there’s an official Twitter app for BlackBerry (built by RIM).

anyone wants to buy a Blackberry Twitter client? Let me know http://ping.fm/OWHzp—
Loic Le Meur (@loic) June 20, 2011

Seesmic might have the sweetest Twitter app for Blackberry, but the Blackberry’s appeal isn’t sweet enough. Seesmic is discontinuing support for its Blackberry app on June 30.

Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, is going through a rough spot right now. But things must be pretty bad if Seesmic bailing. This is Seesmic, folks! They’ll build an app for any platform, even Windows Phone 7.

The truth is that startups can only support so many mobile platforms. Other mobile developers might be feeling the same pressure to drop Blackberry or never create an app for it in the first place. Seesmic is definitely not alone in its assessment of the platform. Mobile Roadie recently concluded the same thing: the Blackberry is too hard to develop for and engagement is low.

What are Seesmic Blackberry users to do? On its blog, the company encourages “those effected by this change to try out Seesmic for Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7.” In other words, get a new phone.

That actually might not be such bad advice.

Aimed at users who want to monitor a particular brand or topic across the whole of the Web, not just the services that Seesmic supports out of the box, the Brandwatch plugin adds additional search/monitoring functionality. This is presented in a new column within the app which updates in real-time to display Brandwatch data alongside the user’s Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds.

Included in that Brandwarch search is information related to sentiment, volume of mentions of that brand and history for any particular query.

As we’ve noted before, brand management in the age of the real-time web can be a tricky business – it’s a forever moving target where even the most established brands are being caught out. It’s also an area evolving quickly as startups emerge to help brands manage their social media reputation and consumers are increasingly becoming more and more savvy with the likes of Twitter, Facebook and other newer social web tools and are realising their power to damage (and enhance) a company or product’s reputation.

Tune in for our full walkthrough of the office, led by Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur.

Oh, and if you want to watch Loic’s full description of Seesmic (which ran a bit long), you can watch it right here.

As usual, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing.

Here are the past episodes of TC Cribs:

• Inside The Psychobox: A Tour Of Dropbox’s Bumping Office
• Take A Doc On The Wild Side At Scribd (With Bonus Go Karts!)
• Dogs, Unicorns, And Mysterious Gongs: Inside Yelp’s 5-Star Pad
• TC Cribs: IGN HQ Gets Its Game On With Lawn Gnomes, Plumbers, And Creepy Dinosaurs

Founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, Seesmic helps both individuals and companies monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. One of the bonuses of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others. Last year, Seesmic launched a deep integration with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise, Chatter.

We had actually heard that Salesforce was looking to invest in Seesmic’s next round of funding last Fall. I’m actually surprised that Salesforce didn’t just buy Seesmic, considering the CRM company’s big push into the social web with Chatter.

The investment will be used to expand Seesmic’s enterprise base of customers, says Le Meur.

(Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was an early investor in Seesmic.)

Editor’s Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name

In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups. A great part of that increased opportunity came as a result of the significant reduction in platform dependencies. No longer did the users’ operating system dictate their access to services or information. Even a behemoth like Microsoft was fighting hand-to-hand combat with small startups for the first time in decades. Fast forward ten years, and it’s 1985 all over again.

But even as the risks of dependencies become better understood by startups and investors, the ascent of Facebook and Twitter seem to point to an ever increasing number of startups with significant business dependencies. Recent changes to both Facebook and Twitter show that neither startups nor their investors can assume much when it comes to support for a given API in the future. Today, even the OS seems subject to dramatic shifts in record time. One only need look to Apple’s iOS to see how dramatic and unpredictable developments can change the landscape for startups, customers and investors.

Today, most startups build with significant external platform dependencies, whether it is Facebook, iOS, Google Apps or Twitter. There are a few types of dependencies. A simple distinction might be to call a dependency on a platform symbiotic or parasitic. Symbiotic dependencies are those for which both sides agree to terms of the dependency and for which both sides seem to derive a benefit. Developers on Facebook’s platform, for example. The most successful here being Zynga, which grew completely and—probably for the team and its investors—nervously within the Facebook ecosystem.

But some dependencies are parasitic. As such, the problem is considerably more sticky when a startup forms an unwelcome dependency. Consider Meebo’s initial products which violated IM network terms of service by “hacking” into the major IM networks. Meebo has had to re-invent itself as a website check-in and sharing platform and at considerable cost (the startup has just announced its most recent round of financing taking it to over $70M in total funding).

In fact, a great portion of the “aggregation” genre of startups have troubling dependencies on larger players who often consider their products either a violation of service terms or simply the next feature on the product roadmap. Take the social media aggregation tools like TweetDeck and Seesmic. It has become clear that even players like Twitter or Facebook who offer generous API access can inadvertently step on the toes of startups in its ecosystem with a new product release. For Seesmic, this appears to mean a third pivot for the startup. The company started as a video commenting platform for blogs, moved into the desktop client social aggregation business and with Twitter’s recent redesign jumped into the plugin (aka, longtail) and enterprise user space (see recent partnership with SalesForce.com and plugin announcements). So for early platforms like Twitter, players like Seesmic and TweetDeck exist in a grey space between symbiotic and parasitic for the platform.

Then there are the 100% parasitic players, including companies like Rapleaf. Rapleaf has a dubious reputation because it built its business on the aggressive and surreptitious collection of social network data and matched it to email addresses. Recently both Facebook and Linkedin threatened legal recourse unless the company ceased crawling and scraping their user data and expunged all existing data collected from their networks maintained on over 650 million email addresses. As a result, two weeks ago Rapleaf agreed to stop providing its customers with information from both networks. That can’t be good for business.

But it is likely even worse for the startups who had based much if not all of their products on data they were buying from Rapleaf, sort of a double dependency. Take Gist, Etacts and Rapportive. All three of these startups were dependent on Rapleaf to present social network information (photos, titles, updates, etc.) alongside emails, mostly Gmail. When their Rapleaf data stopped providing Facebook and Linkedin data, the startups were left only with what appeared to be that which they had cached prior to the cut-off this month. And so it may be no surprise that within just a couple of weeks of the Rapleaf changes Gist is reportedly in talks to sell itself to RIM and Etacts has announced its sale to SalesForce.com (rumored for $6 million). One wonders if the acquiring companies fully understood the dependencies these startups had to Rapleaf. (Prediction: Rapportive also will be forced to sell very soon).

There is an alternative to parasitic access to a platform, but it can be expensive. You can build your own data from scratch or get access to it through painstaking partnerships if it is critical to your business. You might not grow as fast as you otherwise would, but at least you can control your own destiny. Even for startups that are successful in building their business within a platform dependency, such as Zynga, one of the most important things they must do as they grow is to mitigate their dependency on the platform.

For startups and investors, however, the lure and benefits of developing on other’s platforms with or without permission may be too great to avoid. When it comes to acquiring those critical first users, it takes an Odysseian-level of cunning (or foolishness) to avoid the siren’s song of platforms like Facebook. Building on Facebook reduces both the cost of development and provides direct access to a massive user base. And what are the other options? Even if you put aside the costs of going it alone, a significant portion of startups will be faced with taking on significant dependencies for their success. How many mobile OSes can there be? Forget startups, after iOS and Android, even the future of big players like Microsoft, Nokia and Palm seems uncertain in the mobile OS space.

So in the future it will likely be that the most successful startups will be those which are best able to navigate the minefield of platform dependencies. And while the benefits of platforms like iOS, Facebook and Twitter are significant to reduce development costs and increase access to customers, one can’t help but lament the squashing of the promise we got with our first browsers: a world where startups and the behemoths of industry alike fought on more or less equal terms. But increasingly it is once again becoming a platform world. And the companies who control the platforms, control the profits.

Photo credit: Flickr/uub

Just a few months ago Mike was saying Twitter deciding to compete with developers had essentially killed Seesmic. That may be true for consumer chats, but enterprise is another matter. And between Yammer’s new round of funding and Salesforce’s Chatter product, enterprise chat is heating up.

Might Seesmic be a spoiler? The two have already been chummy, with Seesmic integrating into Chatter and Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appearing on stage together multiple times. We’ll post more details when we hear them.

(Disclosure: This may come as a surprise since Mike is so hard on Loic, Seesmic and the French generally, but he was an early investor in the company.)

Salesforce Chatter, the company’s social networking application for the enterprise, can now be integrated into Seesmic’s Android app, allowing users to read their Chatter feeds, comment, view groups, contacts, profiles and post updates from the app. You can also cross-post updates to and from Twitter back into a Chatter account.

The UI of the app now includes a “common actions” area at the top right of every screen, including the composer and refresh actions. Seesmic has also made Tweeting easier by adding an autocomplete of friends usernames feature on Twitter. And when you attach photos and videos to messages, you can tap an “attachment count” button to see all the photos and videos you attached, as well as their size.

Another new Twitter feature in the new version of the app is the ability to see full, threaded conversations between yourself and the person you’re replying to. And the startup has added new language functionality to the Android app, with versions in Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Korean, and Polish.

One of the bonuses to using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of other social web services, like Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare, LinkedIn and others. Seesmic had previously added Chatter to its other applications, but the Android app now has a link to the enterprise.

By all measurements, the new picture sharing service, Instagram, is exploding. A week after their launch, they had 100,000 users. A week later: 200,000. A week after that: 300,000. And then they were made Apple’s App of the Week in the App Store. So yeah, basically they’re likely far past a half a million users already. Not a bad first month at all.

But did you know that Instagram almost wasn’t Instagram at all? I detailed some of their transformation from the location-based HTML5 app Burbn to Instagram in my initial preview of the app. But co-founder Kevin Systrom gave more insight a few weeks ago on Quora.

Systrom revealed that he and co-founder Mike Krieger actually put in about a year’s worth of work into Burbn, finally culminating in the building of a complete native iPhone app. But it just wasn’t very good in their estimation. So they basically threw the entire thing out and started over. Again, after a year of work. The result, just 8 weeks later, was Instagram.

A huge risk. Ballsy.

“We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram,” Systrom wrote.

That element to their story is fascinating to me. I was actually one of the initial users of Burbn after I got a tip about it and was able to sign up before Systrom realized who I was (he quickly emailed me later and asked me not to write about it until he was ready to show something off). I found Burbn interesting because location was getting red-hot at the time, and this was a completely-HTML5 approach that was pretty slick.

But I wasn’t sure how such a service was ever going to take off. The reality right now is that we live in a world of native apps in the mobile space. And Burbn would have been coming very late to the game with an HTML5 gamble and with rivals like Foursquare, Gowalla and others already battling for users.

But it turns out Systrom and Krieger were thinking the same thing. “Once he [Krieger] joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood. By this time, we had built Burbn into a (private) really neat HTML5 mobile web app that let you: Check in to locations, Make plans (future check-ins), Earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more,” Systrom noted on Quora. That all sounds great, but again, a crowded-space that was quickly getting more crowded.

“We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas,” Systrom continued.

And so the pivot happened.

It’s important to note that Systrom and Krieger had already secured $500,000 in funding prior to the pivot, so they had some cash to gamble with. But not all investors would be happy with such a turn. But as Systrom described it, Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz basically told them that they had some good ideas and to figure out the company they wanted to build from those ideas. They decided that Instagram, and not Burbn, would be that company.

Startups pivot all the time. Some are forced to, some are not. Want another good example? Twitter.

The podcasting startup Odeo (where, incidentally, Systrom was an intern back in the day) was more or less going nowhere when Evan Williams told his employees to break into teams to brainstorm some crazy new ideas. One of those teams had Jack Dorsey in it, and Twitter was born.

Speaking of Twitter, Seesmic started as the “video Twitter” before they pivoted to become a Twitter client. Now they’re sort of pivoting again to cater more directly to the enterprise crowd. It’s something that very well could work.

Meanwhile, the Y-Combinator-backed Fliggo earlier this year pivoted away from being another kind of video for Twitter and became Treehouse, an Instagram-competitor. Funny how it all comes around. Will they catch on like Instagram has? Who knows, but if not, the entrepreneurs behind it will undoubtedly be back at it with another idea.

Instagram’s story is a testament to the fact that pivots can and do work — even if it means tossing much of what you had poured your life into for a year or more. It’s all about timing, and learning, and vision, and a hell of a lot of courage.

When I logged on to Brizzly this morning, a notification popped up announcing some brand new features for the web-based social networking client. As you can read on Brizzly maker Thing Labs‘ blog, there are also some design changes accompanying the new features.

Like rival Seesmic Web has done in the past, Brizzly has now added Foursquare support to the fray, which means you can now see your friends’ Foursquare check-ins from within Brizzly. There’s also a new camera control feature and Brizzly has also finally decided to give people the choice on how to retweet, erm, tweets: the classic way or the – not so new anymore – new-style retweet functionality.

Thing Labs has also moved the posting form in Brizzly away from the top of the screen, into the top of the left-hand navigation, so it can be accessed from any Twitter screen. In addition, the startup added easy access to drafts and Brizzly photos while posting.

Finally, if you have a lot of saved searches or Picnics, your navigation menu and the Trends & news section don’t stay in place when you scroll down the page (in the Twitter tab).

Henceforth, you can collapse or expand any of the navigation sections on the left side of the screen by clicking on the title.

While AOL and Thing Labs remain mum on the subject, we’ve heard from solid sources that the former is in the process of acquiring the fledgling company, mostly for its talented and experienced founding and management team.

Thing Labs received a little over $2 million in funding from Polaris Ventures, SoftTech VC, and angels including Michael Jones (now the President of MySpace), Ron Conway, and Greg Yaitanes (best known as a director of the hit Fox TV show House). The company initially sprung out of Polaris’ Dog Patch Labs in San Francisco.

After a year’s worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; “We want to be the first platform for platforms,” says Le Meur.

Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports a multitude of content streams including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google Reader (!), GroupOn (!), Salesforce Chatter, E-Bay, Last.fm and so on and so forth.

With this latest iteration it looks like Seesmic has found a way to prove that it’s more than just a one-trick, Twitter-platform pony, “The inspiration to build SD2 came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin” Le Meur writes on his blog and in fact you can customize the app any way you like, “If you don’t like Foursquare, you can filter out Foursquare.”

Seesmic has also gone the way of the App store and has developed a plugin Marketplace, where you can search and download your favorite news viewing or social interaction plugins. Note: There’s a bit of turbulence in the installation process as you needlessly have to restart Seesmic Desktop in order to get the plugin to initially load.

Seesmic plans on launching payment options next year, but for the moment all plugins are free. And as Seesmic Desktop 2 is an open platform, Le Meur expects many more, “If all goes well there will be hundreds,” he tells TechCrunch hinting at more to come like E-Bay, ZenDesk, Gowalla, GroupOn, Visa, Blippy and Mint.

To encourage this he has built a SDK, offered up the Seesmic team for those companies that don’t have the chops, and hired third-party developers tequilarapido to build some of the more popular plugins like YouTube and Google Reader.

Alongside Seesmic Desktop UI mainstays like URL shortening, Search, Multiple Accounts, Lists, Photos/Video Twitter integration, and accounts support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz, the most exciting new features being launched here are individual to each plugin. And while it would take forever to get into into each one, I will bring up some of the most notable.

YouTube

The YouTube plugin allows you to share and watch video within your Seesmic app, and enables you to keep tabs on your Favorites, Most Popular, etc.

Last.Fm

You can now listen to music through the Seesmic client, if you have a Last.fm Pro account.

Zappos

With the Zappos plugin, perhaps the first social commerce plugin, anytime someone tweets a Zappos link you can see the item and buy it — If a Zappos link is tweeted by someone you follow you can now see all product information in your streams.

Techmeme

You can now view the tech news aggregator entirely on Seesmic, including discussion and related links.

Klout

The Klout plugin includes a small box under tweets in your stream which allows you to see the “Klout” or “influence” rank of of people who are tweeting.

Google Reader

Seesmic Desktop supports all Google Reader features, you can open any RSS and now use Seesmic as an RSS Reader.

Seesmic, which has received 12 million dollars in funding thus far, plans on monetizing Desktop 2 both from eventual Marketplace sales as well as with a classic freemium model which has at its core deep integration with the enterprise software and B2B space, which is where plugins like Salesforce Chatter and ZenDesk fit in. As TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher said about the Chatter integration, “It’s like the link enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.”

Le Meur also plans to take many of the Seesmic Desktop 2 features, and port them over to the iPhone/Android platforms next year. Windows Phone 7 will come first, since it’s the most compatible system with Silverlight.

The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce’s Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once.

It’s clear this is part of a long term strategic partnership between the two companies, and the rapport between the two CEOs is evident. While Seesmic has made a virtue of its ability to develop strong social clients on Adobe Air, Android, BlackBerry, Windows and (via Silverlight) Mac, Salesforce is clearly gunning for the space opened up by ‘enterprise social’ services like Yammer. We’re seeing the first integration of the realtime web and the enterprise, and there is plenty more to come.

At an interview in London, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur told me “It’s not enough to have these two worlds silo’d any more… What we bring is the connection to the outside world without making it scary. With chatter you can directly send someone on the social web [via Seesmic] directly into the enterprise.”

For Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, it’s all about the movement to what he calls Cloud 2: mobile, social, realtime.

Indeed, he wrote a TechCrunch guest post this year, “The Facebook Imperative”, where he said “New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration.”

So how will the integration work?

Here’s an example: A Salesforce user on Seesmic will be able to push, for instance, a Tweet onto the Chatter wall of someone inside a company. That could mean pushing it to a sales rep or a social media response team. You name it. The upshot is a great ability to respond, in realtime, to social conversations around brands or products.

That could mean much better customer service – or more some interesting sales pitches, depending on which side of the fence you are on. But suddenly, instead of needing to physically cut and paste a reference to a Tweet or a Facebook Group or whatever, people who monitor social media can bring that data directly into the enterprise and work out a response. It’s going to make a lot of social media community managers pretty happy – at least the ones who use Salesforce (for now).

When companies need to respond to customer complaints on social media, they need to see context in terms of the prior conversation, internal company feedback etc – this Salesforce Chatter/Seesmic integration effectively makes the whole process a lot easier. It’s like the Missing Link between the enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.

And by moving first on this plane, Seesmic is in a prime position to open up a completely new front against its competitors, like Tweetdeck, which remain locked in the social web and not at all integrated into enterpise systems.

Seesmic’s integration with Chatter has been made possible by its switch to the Miscrosoft Silverlight platform which allows for plugins. Adobe Air does not afford this, so, on the face of it, competitors could well struggle to create the same kind of ecosystem around their core product.

Much of this is discussed in our exclusive video interview with Benioff and Le Meur below.

Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google “Ping,” Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn’t include News results). Apple’s Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple’s Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results.

Le Meur declined to reveal the exact number of accounts created but he did say that the number of accounts created was three times the normal rate in a given day. Apple actually licensed the name Ping from the golf company, as PING owns the trademark.

If Brizzly wouldn’t be slower than molasses in January, I would have long deemed it my Twitter web client of choice (I don’t like running too many desktop clients if I can avoid it – switching tabs in my browser is much quicker). However, it is as slow as a tortoise, so I took a look at the new Twitter.com (testing inline media nowadays) and Seesmic Web for good measure as I tend to use the latter on my iPhone and Android phones.

One thing the Web app has always lacked, is support for Facebook. However, there in the sidebar was the Facebook logo, along with that of LinkedIn and Foursquare. Turns out support for the latter was added last month, along with Ping.fm.

The Facebook and LinkedIn integrations, to the best of my knowledge, are brand new. You can now see status updates and comment on them in separate Seesmic columns, and in the case of Facebook it also allows you to ‘like’ and email things so you can easily share stuff with your friends straight from the Web client.

I also noticed that, at least in Google Chrome, there are desktop notifications that pop up when you receive direct messages or when someone mentions your username or replies to one of your tweets on Twitter. I’ve only had it for about an hour, and I’m already used to it.

Who needs desktop applications anyway, when HTML5-enabled apps behave like this?

Update: Seesmic just confirmed the new Web client on their blog. Aside from Facebook and LinkedIn account integration and HTML5 desktop notifications for Chrome, the new client also comes with a fresh design and new visual clues, as well as support for additional languages (Indonesian, Korean, Polish and Dutch).

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.