Webware

The new Seesmic Desktop app lets Facebook fan page managers update them in sync with Twitter.

(Credit: Loic Le Meur / Seesmic)

There are a handful of Twitter apps out there that can also update Facebook statuses, and no clear market leader, but the new build (version 0.6) of Seesmic Desktop may soon be the app of choice for marketers who use Twitter and Facebook for brand promotion. That's because it can now manage activity on Facebook's "fan pages" as well as personal profiles, meaning that the operators of these pages can update them in sync with Twitter accounts.

"With the Facebook Page feature, you have greater control on how you market your business, oversee your brand, listen to your fans and build your community," a release from Seesmic explained. Facebook, it should be noted, has launched its own feature to push fan page updates directly to Twitter.

If you're an ordinary Facebook user who doesn't manage any fan pages, Seesmic Desktop can also track status posts from those that you subscribe to.

Seesmic Desktop was built after parent company Seesmic, which had previously built a video-commenting company, acquired Twitter desktop app Twhirl.

Founder Loic Le Meur also announced that 2.5 million people have now downloaded Seesmic Desktop, and that Seesmic has partnered with Twitter image-sharing app Yfrog to be its default image provider. It's the second partnership deal for Yfrog in a month, having inked a deal with URL shortener Bitly a few weeks ago. That's probably disconcerting news for Yfrog rival Twitpic, once the unequivocal big player in Twitter image uploads.

LogMeIn, the company behind a recent Webware 100-selected remote-desktop application that lets users access files and data on different computers, plans to go public.

According to documents LogMeIn filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the company plans to offer 6.6 million shares. It hopes to price those shares between $14 and $16.

Assuming that LogMeIn completes its filings and is eventually listed on the Nasdaq stock market, it will be faced with enhanced scrutiny. Not only will it be confronted with more, costly regulations at the hands of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, it will also have a slew of new stakeholders that will require the company to operate at a high level. It's a tall order.

Regardless, LogMeIn ostensibly believes that it's up to the challenge. So now the question is whether its finances can match its desire. Is LogMeIn financially sound, now performing better than it has in the past? Let's take a look.

If you could collect your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and corporate messages into a single in-box, would you switch?

The convenience of a universal e-mail in-box is what gives Yahoo's offline, open-source, cross-platform Zimbra Desktop its appeal (Windows | Mac).

Then there are the other tools to tag and search messages that elevate the Web mail experience beyond what your POP and IMAP services may offer on their own. However, for many, Zimbra's ambitions, abilities, and the sticky tangle of its distribution will keep it an interesting experiment, but not yet a standalone replacement.

While Zimbra Desktop is available to anyone as a free download, the Zimbra team really had its existing users in mind as the chief beneficiaries of this release. The majority of Zimbra's 43 million paid customers come through businesses that are especially drawn to its collaboration tools (like sharing entire address books, documents, and in-boxes) and which typically use Zimbra's back-end server in place of the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Zimbra's online in-box, and now its offline desktop app, take on the role of the Outlook in-box. As with Outlook, the organization will assign the e-mail address. However, it also has an open-source following of people who run the server and desktop app to get these sharing capabilities for free.

Zimbra has some useful features even if you don't have a supported account.

(Credit: CNET)

The benefits of the Zimbra Desktop for these pre-existing users is significant. They can import third-party e-mail and supported third-party calendars in discrete in-boxes, and view expanded and contracted in-boxes in the familiar left-hand organization pane. For each account, including third-party Web mail, they can tag messages, search through e-mail, contacts, and calendar appointments, and view conversations that are organized together not so unlike Gmail's threading.

Zimbra account holders can additionally create wiki documents within Zimbra Desktop and share them with other Zimbra users. They can upload files into a local briefcase (this is separate from Yahoo's now-defunct Briefcase service,) and as mentioned above, can right-click e-mail in-boxes, contacts lists, and other content to export to another Zimbra user's Zimbra in-box within the organization.

These advanced sharing services are the e-mailing ideal, but not available to those of us who aren't on Zimbra's server (more on this below).

And if you don't have Zimbra-supported e-mail?
There's still some use in downloading Zimbra Desktop to help manage your third-party e-mail accounts, but complications and qualifications abound. You should be able to add any e-mail account that supports POP and IMAP standards, plus Yahoo e-mail, contacts, and calendar, and the same from Gmail. If your IT admins make your Outlook Exchange Server settings available to you, you'll be able to get your business e-mail as well.

Expandable subject groupings aren't exactly threaded like Gmail, but they similarly organize.

(Credit: CNET)

These third-party services are branded with a beta marker, a wise warning, since some work with a caveat. Hotmail, for example, will integrate with Zimbra Desktop, so long as you have a paid Hotmail Plus account, or have been grandfathered in from the Outlook Express days.

When you sign up in Zimbra, this is noted by the collapsed link "must allow client access." Likewise, the bumpy support for Gmail doesn't yet convert Gmail labels into Zimbra tags, and Zimbra Desktop 1.0 merges Gmail address book contacts in a way that only surfaces those contacts you've added by hand, not the contacts captured through day-to-day e-mailing. Zimbra says they're working on a fix, which should be released in a few weeks.

Once you've got your in-boxes migrated over, you'll be able to take advantage of searching through mail messages and adding tags, even if your third-party client doesn't support those features by default. Zimbra's ability to group conversations in any mail service is another benefit. Unlike Gmail's service, it won't thread conversations within a single in-box entry, but it will signify with an arrow tip in the margin when there's more than one message with the same subject line.

You'll still be able to create documents in Zimbra if you're using it to sort third-party accounts, but at this point they must route through the Zimbra server in order to share the link. In the future, these documents will send as external attachments, perhaps as soon as June.

Performance and accessibility
Since we didn't have access to a Zimbra-supported account, and therefore to its more advanced collaboration features, the program's overall performance is harder to gauge. Difficulties in setting up our unsupported Hotmail in-box and Zimbra's inability to import 90 percent of our Google contacts makes us hesitant to recommend it as anything more than a companion product for non-Zimbra users.

At more than 40MB for Windows and Mac editions, it was also slow to install and load. However, if you've got lots of space, the calendar importing, conversation view, and search fields are nice bonuses, as is the convenience of viewing multiple Web mail in-boxes in a single program interface.

While Zimbra's stated demographic with the Zimbra Desktop are its registered users, it doesn't help its cause that it takes effort to sign up for a Zimbra account. Most consumers find Zimbra through an organization that uses it; others may go through an Internet Service Provider or hosted partner that might sell subscriptions to Zimbra-powered features under the company's own name.

An open-source subset may run the open-source Zimbra Collaboration Suite on their networks, but for folks without a finger on the pulse of the open-source community, finding one of these to plug into could take more motivation than its worth.

Zimbra Desktop certainly has some budding in-box concepts we'd like to see ripen, but until Yahoo's Zimbra team can smooth out the grafting challenges with Gmail and other third-party services, those without Zimbra accounts who are feeling less experimental ought to stick to Thunderbird (Windows|Mac) as an Outlook alternative.

Updated April 29, 2009 at 8:45 am with more details about integrating third-party services.

We've been keeping our eye on Zimbra Desktop, the e-mail client that Yahoo acquired in 2007 and held onto for about a year before development work picked up again in earnest. Now, more than a year later, Zimbra Desktop 1.0 has shaken off its beta and is available as a free download for Windows and Mac.

Zimbra differentiates itself from Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client (Windows|Mac) and from Gmail in its amphibian nature as both an online and offline in-box. It also sees itself as a central in-box for all your e-mail, contacts, and calendar information. As such, you're able to access Yahoo and Gmail contacts, calendars, and messages in Zimbra, plus POP or IMAP e-mail from AOL, Hotmail, or your office. At least, that's in theory. According to Zimbra's Web site, syncing to some of the third-party e-mail and calendar services within Zimbra Desktop appear to remain beta features, like Hotmail, and Yahoo and Google calendars. While the support for these last two has been expanded in this release, a Zimbra representative told us, "officially those integrations are still considered 'beta' since they rely on APIs not maintained by the Zimbra team."

Unlimited storage and support for 20 languages rounds out the feature overview.

A slew of bug fixes and back-end tune-ups update the most recent beta version of Zimbra to its 1.0 release, a representative from Zimbra told CNET. Plus, there is now greater diversity in sharing Zimbra documents, and full support for Yahoo and Google contacts and calendars, in addition to Web mail.

While Zimbra Desktop 1.0 is free for personal use, Zimbra has been making Yahoo money through Zimbra Collaboration Suite, a hosted e-mail solution for schools and enterprise businesses like RedHat and 21st Century Realty Group.

Popular desktop Twitter client Twhirl has a new sibling. Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, who acquired the Adobe AIR-based application about a year ago, has dubbed the new service "Seesmic Desktop," which is being launched in preview as a separate product from Twhirl.

Some of the new features include the capability to monitor multiple feeds side-by-side in a similar fashion to TweetDeck, create custom user lists, and post from multiple accounts while the application keeps track of which ones are which to keep duplicates at bay. You can also drag and drop photos from your computer to post straight to Twitter, making use of the fact that it's running off of Adobe's AIR platform.

However, not all of this functionality will be available from the get-go. The service is being launched in "preview" and will support only Twitter, however Le Meur said his team is on track to release support for other services in about a month. He also said that there's a pro version on the way that should fill in the company's business model, since this version--just like Twhirl, will not contain advertising.

One thing is clear though--Twhirl's life cycle may be at an end. While Le Meur said that development will continue on it, that could simply mean bug fixes. Considering Seesmic Desktop is launching as a Twitter client from the get-go should tell you something.

Seesmic Desktop preview is available for download right now, although you've got to sign up to be a member of "Team Seesmic," the company's new community site.

You can catch the whole live blog after the break.

The new Seesmic Desktop is kind of like the old Twhirl, meets Tweetdeck--with a dash of iTunes.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A lot is happening on Facebook. Not only are your friends telling the world what's going on in their lives, but the social network itself is changing. It's more open now than before, thanks to the Facebook Connect program, and there are several good products that let you see Facebook data in new ways. You don't have to use Facebook.com to use Facebook anymore. Here are some of the best desktop applications.

The newbies: AIR apps

Seesmic for Facebook
An Adobe AIR app, Seesmic for Facebook (news) uses Facebook Connect to let you update your status and view friend status updates without surfing to the Facebook site. It's in beta testing, but it works as advertised: updating status is quick and easy, and whenever a friend updates their own status, it's there for me to see. It's a little buggy, but it was just released.

TweetDeck
TweetDeck is one of the most popular Twitter desktop clients, and now the app's developers are vying for Facebook dominance too. The upcoming version of TweetDeck lets you send a message just to Twitter, just to Facebook, or to both simultaneously. Once installed, the new version also includes a column displaying friends' status updates, and it offers the ability to chat with them via Facebook chat directly. The app isn't available to everyone just yet, but its public release is right around the corner.

Windows Apps

Facebook Desktop
A Windows-only app, Facebook Desktop provides real-time updates, lets you see wall posts, view messages, and read friend requests. It's one of the best-looking apps, too.

Facebook Photo Uploader
The folks at the Google Code Base have a neat little desktop app for Windows users that allows them to upload photos directly to Facebook and tag them before they get to the service. It's not the best-looking app, and it's a little buggy, but I'm impressed by its ease of use.

Lightweight and unobtrusive makes Tray a great app.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook Tray Notify
Sometimes, a desktop client just gets in the way. If you feel that way, turn to Facebook TrayNotify. It's a lightweight app that sits in your taskbar awaiting Facebook notifications. Once it receives them, alerts pop up, letting you know about the updates. If you want to act on them, you'll need to go to the Facebook site to do so.

FBLook
FBLook is useful, if you're an Outlook user. Besides filling you in on friends' status updates, you can update your own Facebook status, and see notifications and requests without going to the Facebook Web site--it all works within Outlook on your desktop. Although I'm running a Mac every day, I still use FBLook whenever I run my Windows machine. In fact, it's one of the first apps I fire up.

FBQuick
If you're looking for a nicely designed app that will work on your Windows PC and give you some of the best functionality around, look at FBQuick. The app sends you profile notifications, including tagged photos, pokes, and messages, but it doesn't allow you to update anything while on your desktop.

Fonebook
If you're an Outlook user, and you have a mobile phone that supports Outlook, check out the Fonebook app. Once installed on your desktop, the app will transfer your contacts and photos from Facebook to Outlook. The app copies a contact's photo, Facebook profile URL, the "About me" details, and status. That can then be synced with an Outlook-compatible phone so whenever someone calls, the person's picture and information will pop up on your mobile-phone screen.

Mac Apps

Dashboard Widget
Dashboard Widget gives you Facebook on your OS X Dashboard. It will display messages, pokes, friend requests, group invites, and other notifications. It updates whenever new notifications filter in.

Exporter for iPhoto couldn't be easier to use.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto
If you want to upload photos into Facebook, and you don't want to waste your time firing up Safari, use the Facebook Exporter for iPhoto. It's the best photo-uploading service for Macs. It allows you to find photos in iPhoto, tag them with your friends' names, add captions, and upload them as an album to your profile. It's incredibly easy to use.

FacebookSync
If you're an Address Book user, FacebookSync will automatically sync information from Facebook into your Apple Address Book. The service finds matches in your friends list and adds all their information, including name, address, phone number, and other data to your Address Book. It even adds their photos to the app.

Facile
If you simply want to update your status update or view all your friends' status updates, Facile for the Mac is a nice way to do it. It provides a simple interface showing your friends' profile pictures and latest status updates, and allows you to input your own updates above the list (it's a lot like Seesmic for Facebook).

FriendSaver
This is a Facebook screensaver. It finds your friends tagged in photos and starts displaying those in succession while your Mac is dormant. And if you want to take some friends out of the queue, you can filter them out with a simple click. Or just display your male or female friends.

PhotoBook
A Facebook photo browser for your Mac, PhotoBook allows you to manage, share, and view your friends' Facebook photos without ever going to their profile pages. All the photos are available on a single page, and they can be viewed by tags or in a slideshow. Every photo or album can be downloaded into iPhoto.

The others

Bloom makes it easy to add images.

(Credit: Facebook)

Bloom
Bloom, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, allows you to upload photos, download other albums, and view your friends' photos without surfing to Facebook pages. A recent update allows you to add captions to images, rotate them before you upload, and tag different people. It has a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Drag-and-Drop Uploader
If you don't want all the extras that Bloom provides, Drag-and-Drop Uploader (for Windows) makes it simple to add images to your Facebook profile. The service is lightweight, and in a matter of seconds, you can drag photos from your desktop and add them to the app, which will then be uploaded into albums in your profile.

DeskBook
The Windows app DeskBook allows you to access Facebook features and information without accessing your profile page. Regardless of whether you want to see how many notes you've received, how many friend requests you've ignored, or if you want to just search for friends, DeskBook does it all. It even lets you accept or reject group and event invitations, as well as friend requests. It's my go-to app when I want to get the full Facebook experience without going to my profile page.

Facedesk
There's not much to Facedesk, but that is its appeal. The app can be downloaded to your desktop, and it runs Facebook directly in the app instead of your browser. Yes, it acts like a browser, but it runs only Facebook, so you won't be able to open any other sites. It's Facebook for people who care about nothing else in the world.

Flair
Flair's functionality won't blow you away--it's a notification app that lets you know when a friend wants to add you, or you receive a poke--but it does that in a lightweight bundle that doesn't hog resources, and it offers one of the best designs of any app in this roundup. It's not unique, but it sure is pretty.

Zebr
AIR app Zebr allows you to update your status without going to your profile page, and it keeps track of your friends' status automatically.

Applications that let you access the files on your desktop from anywhere else are wonderful things, but the traditional remote-desktop app has one annoying flaw--you must browser for an e-mail, photo, or document in often tall, brambly file trees. Copernic Mobile (see slide show), in a sturdy prerelease build for Windows XP and Vista, offers the thorough indexing of a remote-access tool, but with a search component that makes finding those individuals files as simple as using a desktop search tool like Google Desktop--or Copernic Desktop Search.

Copernic Mobile--for XP and Vista--simplifies remote access from your phone's mobile browser.

(Credit: CNET)

It works by downloading Copernic Mobile's remote access application to your desktop and registering for a free account. If you're using Copernic Desktop Search in the free or pro version, or Windows Desktop Search, the app will connect up with the desktop search tool's index of your computer's contents to let you search for files, e-mails, music, photos, videos, contacts, favorites, Web history, and anything else the search app keeps tabs on. It doesn't yet play nice with Yahoo or Google's desktop search apps, which is a missed opportunity to engage some stalwart users before either company begins marketing a similar solution.

After logging into mobile.copernic.com from any Internet-equipped cell phone and entering your credentials, you'll be able to launch a search (clink the proffered link to enter a secure server.) The search return interface works on the spectrum of mobile phones and browsers (I tested it on three), with a more stylized look for iPhone. Depending on your phone's capability, you'll be able to view, download, and e-mail a result. The search function worked flawlessly during our tests, and navigating the app was fast and easy on Wi-Fi, 3G, and Verizon's regular, old data network on a BlackBerry Curve, iPhone, and Samsung Omnia. While other remote access apps like the mobile-specific Sugar Sync, the Internet-portal LogMeIn Free, and others do remote access equally well, the seamless search function makes Copernic Mobile my current favorite.

Copernic Mobile: View Windows files from your phone--photos

If you checked into Oscar night this year, you may have caught host Hugh Jackman's brief but hilarious quip about finding the backup dancers for his opening number on Craigslist--dubbed 'Craigslist Dancers' in his ditty. Though Jackman's dance troupe was likely anything but discount, the utility of Craigslist listings is, for many, no ruse. And the more important a service is, the more developers will create companion services to enhance the basics (take Twitter, to wit).

CL Desktop has nice black themes and good navigation, but why is the listing cut off?

(Credit: CNET)

CL Desktop is a new Adobe AIR application (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) that pulls Craigslist.com listings into to a skinnable desktop wrapper. CL Desktop has some nice perks overall, with a couple more baubles than you'd find online. However, a few other features are absent or could be improved.

CL Desktop mostly mirrors Craigslist's searching filters, down to posting records with photos only. However, local-level neighborhood search hasn't been implemented in the U.S., which put a hamper on my house-hunting. Likewise, the text in some of the returned results cut off instead of wrapping to the next line, which made the interface look a little sloppy.

Being able to name and save searches was CL Desktop's single biggest benefit. Choosing the number of records to show on a page is another win, as is being able to quickly save a posting as a favorite, read the full post from the app or online, and answer a classified post from the app. The listings displayed in CL Desktop, however, were never perfectly in sync with Craigslist.com. Although the results matched up after a few refreshes, we'd like to see them in lock step.

CL Desktop told us in an e-mail that the application, which houses a browser, gets its goods straight from Craigslist. Since the application only stores search queries and links to your favorite posts instead of actual Craigslist data, it appears to avoid violating Craigslist's terms of use, which govern the ways in which a Web site or other service can reproduce Craigslist listings.

While some will prefer to stick with Craigslist's slightly faster, sparer-looking original, the visually minded will appreciate the enhanced CL Desktop, especially the features that save search queries and bookmark favorite posts.