Seesmic for iPhone now takes advantage of the Retina Display for newer iPhone and iPod Touch devices for a visually improved interface. We also take advantage of Multi-Tasking with Fast App Switching," says the Seesmic team. "A simple pull-down of the timeline, will load new content. We’ve also added infinite scrolling to load additional updates seamlessly when you arrive at the bottom of a timeline."

"If you spend a lot of time with Replies and Direct Messages, we’ve organized it to provide you the ability to view your replies and private direct message in a threaded conversation view," says the team. "We’ve also made some updates to manage your Facebook social stream. The Newsfeed has been updated for easier viewing, and you’ll be able to now read your private messages inbox. You can now also take advantage of being able to view the list of your friends, as well as see their profile."

The List support is probably the most welcome new feature for avid Twitter users. Lists are a big part of how a lot of people use Twitter these days, and Seesmic is still a popular avenue for Twitter usage on mobile devices. 

Seesmic says it is also experimenting with monetization efforts for its iPhone app, with the use of iAd in the US Market.

WordPress introduced a new subscriptions feature. "Let’s say you’re reading a blog on WordPress.com that you really enjoy — so much so you want to be notified when new posts are published so you remember to read them," WordPress explains. "You can subscribe to this blog really easily by using the ‘Subscribe’ menu in the admin bar. By going up to your admin bar, and clicking ‘Subscribe to blog’, you’ll be instantly subscribed and all current and future posts will be added to the subscriptions tab on your WordPress.com home screen."

Facebook added a new ad impressions counter. As PaidContent’s David Kaplan writes, this social metric will show benefits of ads that include social context from people’s friends on Facebook. 

Seesmic released a new version of Seesmic Desktop. "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," a representative for Seesmic told us.  "And so, SD2 was born. With the plugin architecture in SD2, you can easily add, remove and customize the platform to include only the services that matter to you." 

Netflix streaming is now available for Panazonic VIERA Cast HDTVs and Blu-Ray players. CrunchGear has more on this. 

Opera and Netrange MMH revealed a new way for device manufacturers to give consumers a wide variety of content on their connected TVs – a space that it is obviously getting more competitive by the day.  They will deliver the Opera Devices SDK and a pre-qualified suite of web-based TV content to be deployed on TV platforms supporting HbbTV and other pan-European initiatives. More on this here. 

Intel released an iGoogle gadget for MESH  power management information.

"User Streams will allow tweets in your timeline (including mentions and direct messages) to show up instantly," says Seesmic. "Events and actions, such as someone following you, or someone marking your tweet as favorite will also appear in real-time, all without needing to refresh."

Seesmic Desktop 2 will be available for both Windows and Mac, but is only available for Windows right now.

Seesmic is encouraging users of the beta to to activate the user streams via the plug-in settings.

"Ping.fm is compatible with every single Internet device in the world, which why it has become so successful among thousands of users," says Seesmic. "Try using chat to update Twitter, and you’ll find it direct and seamless as you can post updates from gtalk, aim or skype through Ping.fm. It’s so simple and amazing, and it’s always on."

Social Networks that Ping.fm supports:

"Thanks to its powerful and simple API, more than a hundred applications already use Ping.fm to update all the main social networks and Seesmic commits to maintaining and improving the Ping.fm platform," says Seesmic. "Not only has Twhirl supported Ping.fm for about a year, but we are also preparing to open Seesmic apps with our own plug-in architecture so we understand and care about the developer community."

A list of apps that support Ping.fm can be found here.

Seesmic says that Seesmic applications on Blackberry, Android, Web, Windows and OSX via Air will all have advanced Ping.fm integration "very shortly," and will instantly support 50 social networks. Users will be able to update not only with the apps they are used to, but also with Ping.fm’s email, sms and chat gateways, the company says. 

Seesmic applications have been downloaded over three and a half million times. Financial details about the acquisition have not been made public.

Related Articles:

> Seesmic’s Acquisition of Twhirl

> Seesmic Befriends (And Buys) Twitter Client Twhirl

> Update Your Status Across Dozens of Social Media Sites

“So what?” you’re probably asking.

Well, there’s a few things that Disqus does.

1. It hooks into FriendFeed. Why does that matter? Well, if you register your Disqus account (like I have) all of your comments left on blogs that use Disqus’s service, will show up on FriendFeed. Look at my FriendFeed stream. You’ll already see my Seesmic video comments that I left on some other blogs.
2. In the past hour they just turned on video comments thanks to a partnership with Seesmic. Go here to see my first video comment left on Dave Winer’s blog.
3. There’s an identity system. I don’t have to sign into comment on anyone’s blog who also has Disqus implemented. For instance, when I went over to costpernews.com and left another video comment there, I didn’t need to sign in. Plus my comments have my picture on them, which makes it less likely that someone will steal my identity.
4. Disqus comments are spam resistant. Because they use a robust identity system across blogs they can kick people off who misbehave.
5. Disqus comments are threaded.

Sam Harrelson was the first one to report the Seesmic/Disqus news on his CostPerNews blog.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is because the video commenting system is quite nice. Easy to use and easy to watch.

This is yet another piece in connecting us all together in the real time system I call “the World Wide Talk Show.”

Here’s some sites that have the Disqus/Seesmic commenting feature turned on:

http://loiclemeur.com/
http://louisgray.com/
http://shegeeks.net/
http://winextra.com/
http://avc.blogs.com/
http://howardlindzon.com/
http://scripting.com

More will almost certainly come soon. I’m looking at this technology too. I’ve been talking with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the folks who run my blog) and they are looking at a raft of things to do to make commenting better for WordPress.com users.

So, let the commenting wars begin!

If you are a blog owner, what do you think about Disqus? Like it? Recommend it to other people?

Comments

What I like about the Seesmic’s acquisition of Twhirl isn’t that I’m using it as my default client for Twitter.   Or that I happen to use Seesmic and look forward to some chocolate and peanut butter goodness.

I thought last year was the year of offline apps.  And it was, of platforms.  The rise of AIM was a case in point, but it still needed a kller app.  It might still, and when Eugene Lee first mentioned Twhirl to me I didn’t take too much note of it beyond  richer clone of Twitterific.  Later adopted it and you learn about social tools by playing with them.

The thing is we will see more special purpose browser clients that leverage the opaque flows of APIs.  We’ve all expected it, but now we see them enriching the desktop.  Look at PicLens.  Just look and look and look how it augments, for now, the browser experience.  Expect that Tim Berners Lee expected an editor, not a browser.  And then with varying media and microcontent, the possibilities are even more diverse than what you expect now.

In the enterprise, of course, this has to get past the standard desktop model that is administered.  Individual choice will still thrive within he standard browser.  But experimentation of a richer, more persistent and connected web will happen.  As we reverberate between centralization and decentralization, with darlings like FriendFeed feeding upon a small ebb of fragmentation, the timing is right for things that bring our disparate activity together for us in new ways (not that Lifetreaming is new, its the pattern and time in which solutions are brought to bear for them).

The Seesmic thing makes sense on a number of levels beyond the trend line.  It starts with how a flash vdeo client plays well with AIM.  And the need to hook into the command line of an emerging web (and for twitter and others it becomes interesting if clients that subsume attention subsume more).  Just follow the attention and gestures that mean something (Steve Gilmore, where art thou?).

None of this is ready for mainstream (consumer, already made the other point).  But, I, for one, welcome our new atomized client underlords.  The underweb, today, fits those who do more than browse in their pajamas.  And if you think more than that — too much information.

Comments

 Loic Le Meur

Twhirl‘s price remains unknown, but on all other subjects, Le Meur has been extremely forthcoming.  Want to know why Seesmic purchased Twhirl, for example?  Le Meur lists a total of 20 reasons.  "[Twhirl creator] Marco Kaiser is super cool and it is all about people" catches the PR side; "[Twhirl] is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day" should convince statisticians.

The addition of video to Twhirl will remain optional, so fans who fear change needn’t worry about that.  Also, in terms of what else is to come, we appear to be getting a preview thanks to a conversation on TechCrunch.  Le Meur has promised Gabe Rivera a button that will return users to the main timeline, and he should "eliminate delays by getting tweets via XMPP instead of polling," as well.

There are obviously some potential sticking points – Seesmic is still in alpha, and Twitter itself is notorious for suffering untimely outages.  Yet on the whole, the deal looks like it could give quite a boost to microblogging.

With all the platforms available now (from YouTube to Viddler to Seesmic and JustinTV), creating and sharing video has never been easier.  As a social media agency though, we come across clients all the time (usually old-school marketers or PR types) who are just skeptical.

"Sure, Jim, you can get the video and put it out there, but do you really think people sit around and watch this stuff?"

Um, yes. They do. And not just a little–a lot. Only 22 billion views of user-generated video in 2007.  This is projected to rise to 34 billion views in 2008.  So, yes, note to all clients, people are watching this stuff.

So the next question that always follows is some version of, "Really, what’s wrong with these people? Who watches this stuff?"

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (as reported by e-Marketer), there is a clear age difference, with 30% of 18-29 year olds reporting that they actively visit these sites versus only 4% of folks over age 65. 

Men are also about twice as likely as women to watch user-generated video than women (20% to 11%), but there is not much difference as you look at education level, income or ethnicity. Remember this is user-generated video. The numbers are different for all online video viewing. I’ll share those numbers in a couple of days.

The bottom-line lesson here is clear:  There’s a tremendous opportunity for video to help folks with their social media marketing. If you do it right, people are clearly willing to watch.  Here’s a little video I did to explain what a social media agency is and does.  Ya know, just in case you’re looking for something to watch right now…

Comments

It seems there are any number of video sharing services that you can sign up for and use – see this long list by Robin Good, and this one from TechCrunch last summer of five services offering live video.

What is new is the means for anyone to instantly record video of anything, anywhere and at any time – not necessarily tied to a computer – and then use that video as a starting point for ‘video conversations.’

What I’m talking about here are two relatively new services that started up recently with a focus on mobile video, one of them enabling a prototype such service only a couple of days ago.

I think these are the vanguard of what will soon come in live and near-live video from anywhere with just a mobile device.

The two new services are Qik and seesmic, both in invitation-only alpha testing (seesmic’s service is actually pre-alpha at the moment).

I’ve been trying out and playing with both companies’ offerings for a few months. Even though far from polished, they’re terrific (and great fun).

Qik is all about streaming live video from your mobile phone in real time.

That’s what makes it extremely compelling. Wherever you are with your phone, if you have either a cellular or a wifi connection, you can instantly broadcast your video over the net.

To all intents and purposes, it’s just like live TV. Indeed, with your phone, you’re a mobile TV station. Yet there’s one major difference – people can talk to you via text messaging as you’re broadcasting.

What you transmit is saved on the Qik website for recorded viewing. Here are videos I’ve made so far with Qik, some via a wifi connection, others via cellular.

The service currently supports only certain Nokia models; a large range, though, including the N95 8GB that I have.

Seesmic, on the other hand, is all about recording video on the seesmic website via a webcam on your computer.

It’s deeper than just that, though, as your recordings form part of a conversational ecosystem – think of an audio-visual Twitter community – where video replaces text.

In an interview founder Loic Le Meur had with the BBC last week, the service was referred to as "a vision of the future of online video."

Recording to the web was only how seesmic worked until last week when Loic Le Meur made it possible to use the service from a mobile phone via video sharing service ShoZu.

This adds a further dimension to conversational video which is now mobile.

It’s not hard to see that such mobile communication tools can have a valuable role to play from a business communication point of view.

For instance, Dennis Howlett raised some interesting points in a post yesterday on his blog (and also in the SAP Community Network) in which he suggested some roles for seesmic mobile in specific business situations.

Moreover, seesmic will be in prominent use at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week. Talk about high-profile exposure!

While it really isn’t hard to see how useful both live and recorded mobile video can be in a business context, it’s equally not hard to see that such easy and instant means of communicating will present many organizations with concerns about, for instance, privacy and data protection.

Some will see negatives surrounding control (lack of) and employee ‘loss of focus’ in the workplace in a similar vein to some companies’ knee-jerk reactions last summer over employee use of social networks like Facebook.

What’s important is to take a balanced view, examining all the pros and cons before coming to any conclusions, whether that’s walking or jumping to them.

Better do it sooner rather than later as technologies and behaviours are developing and changing very quickly indeed.

Much quicker than you think.

Comments