Monthly Archives: January 2010

Quick Take: Seesmic

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Today, Seesmic announced yet another new product, entitled Seesmic Look. I applaud CEO Loic Le Meur at his ability to be dynamic, both in his presentation of this new product, and his insight to see that the Twitter ecosystem needed a game-changing app to really prevail. At first glance, I echo Robert Scoble’s review of the product, as he shares the same reactions I do. However, I see a deeper problem at Seesmic, and it comes down to long-term execution.

Let’s take a quick look at Seesmic’s product launches.

  • April 7, 2009 – Seesmic Desktop – Twitter/Facebook client built on Adobe AIR
  • July 10, 2009 – Seesmic Web – Web twitter client
  • July 10, 2009 – Seesmic iPhone app – iPhone Twitter client
  • November 17, 2009 – Seesmic Desktop – Twitter client built on .NET
  • November 20, 2009 – Seesmic Android & BlackBerry app – mobile clients
  • January 21, 2010 – Seesmic Look – a .NET Twitter client

First, these are all excellent products, and I’m glad that Loic has shared the development of these applications with the world.

However, outside of the mobile apps, I have yet to really see a version 1.0 worthy product. I really enjoy using Seesmic Desktop for Windows, especially in it’s new .NET form, but it still feels like a beta product. Facebook integration also was dropped along the way, and is not present in the web app either. So, while I applaud Loic’s development team in deploying great applications across a multitude of platforms in an unheard of amount of time, I’d really like to see some focus on bringing these products up to true 1.0 release status.

Thanks, and I’m sure I’ll be a long-time Seesmic user.

PS, when is video going to make a comeback to Seesmic? I’d like to see a basic video recorder/uploader built into the desktop client.

Social Graphs and Online Identity: What’s next?

Here’s some good questions: How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many on LinkedIn? How many on various IM services? What about Twitter? If your answer is the same for all these questions, I’d be very surprised.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote on this very issue back in November of 2007, and he was suggesting OpenSocial as the most likely solution moving forward. Facebook Connect launched a year later in November 2008.

Fast forward to 2010… Facebook now has over 350 million active users. MySpace claims over 76 million in the US alone. Twitter has over 50 million accounts. And the “old” social networks (e-mail & IM) claim millions of users as well (Windows Live 375M+). Each of these networks still maintain their own versions of social graphs, and none of them will actively “share” information with one another.

Today, I ran across a startup called Soocial, which claims to sync your contacts (read: social graphs) across multiple networks. WE’RE SAVED, right? Not really… The service requires client software on any phone to sync, client software on a PC to sync, and despite claiming to be “hassle-free”, is too much for most users to set up.

So, what will it take to really win in this space?

  1. Partnership at a high-level – Execs at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, AIM, LinkedIn, etc need to be willing to share social graph data with outside sources. Remember, the entire purpose of social networks is to publish and share information with others. If the data is already public, why not make it accessible?
  2. Constant Sync – Today’s sync tools are largely based around “importing” your contacts in a one-time data comparison. A true winner will maintain a synchronized relationship of data, pushing and pulling data as it changes across the network
  3. Published Contact Info – Google Profiles & Plaxo  are a great start of maintaining active contact information for an individual. The next step is providing this level of detail across multiple networks, maintaining a canonical contact card that can change whenever any linked service changes.

Some early attempts:

Further Reading: