Webware

TweetDeck now doubles up profile pics on retweets to give original poster's credit.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Seesmic's Twitter reader app for Mac and Windows is looking at some serious renewed competition from TweetDeck.

The newly updated TweetDeck 0.32 (and AIR app for Windows and Mac,) packs in a host of changes that should make the desktop app more attractive to power tweeters. Chief among these is new behavior for retweeting, when users share a contact's tweet with their own list of followers in just a click. TweetDeck supports two formats, the "new style" that spits out an identical post and displays both your photo and that of the original tweeter, and the "original" style that lets you edit before you post the duplicated message. We like that TweetDeck can remember your preference, or that you can do nothing and choose fresh each time.

(Credit: TweetDeck)

The new TweetDeck also incorporates Twitter Lists for the first time, a grouping feature that Twitter launched about a month ago. Just as you can manage individuals on TweetDeck, you can also manage lists and omit people on them that you don't directly follow. You're able to create new lists from scratch or from a list you already have.

In addition, tweets that include geolocation information now pop up with a yellow pin at the bottom of the message. You can click the pin to expand an embedded map. We haven't seen any of these show up in our lists yet, but the concept of convenience is similar to what Yahoo Messenger already does when it embeds photos and videos into chat windows. We hope that's next here, too.

Adding and expanding on Twitter features isn't TweetDeck's only move. The update also pulls the LinkedIn social network onboard, which means you can now read status streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace in TweetDeck's column view, in addition to tracking streams from various Twitter accounts.

The version 0.32 update also makes its mark with a reorganized Add Column screen that replaces previous menu items with redesigned navigation for maintaining your Tweeting dashboard. The new TweetDeck includes numerous bug fixes as well; here's the changelog for more details.

The Twitter service with the cutesy raccoon mascot is making a new home on BlackBerry and Google Android phones. The free Seesmic, like its proliferate rivals, lets you read, manage, and compose Twitter messages much more flexibly than you can do from Twitter's Web site. We crash-tested both mobile versions as soon as we heard the news.

Seesmic on Android
Seesmic 1.0 for Android is available from the Android Market app, which is located on the smartphone. It takes up just over 1MB. The interface spreads four tabs along the top in both landscape and portrait mode, one each for the timeline, replies, direct messages, and your profile. There's also a ribbon on the screen that you can tap to refresh the feed. Click to open a tweet and you can save it as a favorite, retweet, or reply as a public "@" message or as a private posting. From the menu button, you can refresh, compose, or tinker with the settings.

Although Seesmic's Android interface is much more stripped down than its desktop AIR app for Windows and Mac, the app manages to remain flexible by giving you a choice over the kinds of notifications you'd like to receive, and over the partner services you'd prefer to use to send a photo, video, or shorten a URL.

Sure, it's blurry (blaming the BlackBerry camera), but squint hard enough and you'll see that Seesmic associated a picture with my account that's not actually my face.

(Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

The biggest flaws we've noticed so far? ... Read more

Twitter's geolcation API in action.

(Credit: Twitter/Birdfeed)

Twitter has now launched the geotagging API, or application programming interface, that it announced in August.

Users now have the option to opt-in to geolocation by clicking a box in their settings menu, according to Twitter. For now, the company said, the impact of geotagging will be in third-party apps. Users won't see a difference to Twitter.com just yet.

Twitter contends that including a user's location when he or she tweets could significantly add to its microblogging service. The company wrote in a blog post that the new feature should allow users to "better focus in on local conversations."

Several third-party tools, including Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, and Twittelator Pro are already supporting geolocation, Twitter said. It should be interesting to see how other developers will incorporate location-based information into their apps.

A look at the Facebook news feed in Brizzly. Check out the buttons at the top to toggle back and forth between Facebook and Twitter.

(Credit: Brizzly)

Brizzly, a Twitter client that's still private beta, on Wednesday added the ability for members to follow their Facebook contacts as well through the Web-based service (unlike many of its competitors, Brizzly has opted to not take the form of a downloadable desktop app)--and to post Brizzly updates back to their Facebook profiles. For those of you who have Brizzly accounts, it should be live later on Wednesday if it isn't already.

It's a natural move: Most Twitter clients, like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, also support updates from Facebook to one degree or another. Brizzly, created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs and spearheaded by Blogger and Google veteran Jason Shellen, makes a Twitter feed look quite a bit like a Facebook news feed by expanding image and video links from services like TwitPic and YouTube.

Through Facebook Connect, Brizzly can pull in your news feed so that you can toggle back and forth between a Twitter view and a Facebook view. But it's a little bit limited for now: currently, it's just the revamped "top stories" news feed, not the live-streaming feed that had been Facebook's default until this week.

Of note: when you've clicked on Facebook view in Brizzly, the Brizzly bear mascot is wearing a Facebook-logo sweatshirt and waving a pennant. Now that's just plain cute.

UPDATE: We hear the bear's name is Phineas.

The real-time search company OneRiot is launching an advertising play for Twitter. The new feature, called RiotWise, lets content companies push links to their stories on the OneRiot search result pages. It's unlike every other online ad play out there in that the advertisements are for content, not commerce.

Say you're doing a OneRiot search for "Paris." Instead of seeing ads for airfares and hotels, as you would on Google, you'll see instead links to "Featured Content" about Paris from content producers -- news sites, blogs, and online magazines.

For the user, these are useful links, and thus valuable. But pulling this off for content is harder than it is for commerce, both financially and technically.

RiotWise will display "featured content" alongside natural search results.

(Credit: OneRiot)

On the money side, online content pays less, per page, than commerce. A single click on a news story is monetized primarily by advertising. A good news page makes a few pennies per page view. Most make far less. A commerce page designed to sell something, clearly, can make a lot more.

And on the tech side, there are vastly more content pages than there are ads, so matching a story to a search result page means that the OneRiot system has to do more than just let advertisers say which page goes with which keywords. OneRiot has to read in content feeds from its advertisers in near real-time, and pitch to users only the best and most current stories from partners, based on user search terms and content inside the stories.

OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk (Elon's brother) says that the company's advertising customers will find the incoming links from his service's users valuable, since OneRiot users are likely to redistribute (re-tweet) or forward stories along, thus increasing a story's presence.

It's a unique plan to monetize Twitter, but it's a delicate balance. Essentially it's an arbitrage model: Musk is asking publishers, who are paid by advertisers, to themselves pay for advertising on OneRiot to get more traffic, thus increasing their revenue yield per page. There's nothing fundamentally new about the concept (TV shows are advertised on TV all the time), but it's a bit of a tightrope. (Disclosure: I have heard that CBS is a partner of OneRiot, but Musk would not confirm this with me. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS. Update: More recently, I learned there is no such relationship between CBS and OneRiot.)

RiotWise ads will run on the OneRiot.com site, but the real potential for this plan, according to Musk, lies in the integration of RiotWise into Twitter apps. Potential customers are Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. In two weeks, a new application programming interface will let developers embed RiotWise suggestions into search results. OneRiot will share revenues with app developers for these paid links.

This is a smart play. Advertising will continue its move to the Web. When the economy begins to really turn around and general online advertising increases, the online pubs hosting these ads will need to generate additional pages to make good on their commitments to customers to deliver clicks. Thus OneRiot's plan may just work. It's not likely, however, that it will remain independent or unchallenged. This technology belongs at Google, or Microsoft. I expect it will end up there, one way or the other.

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.

AOL's instant messenger, AIM, becomes on Tuesday the AIM Lifestream and gets support for modern social services Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious.

A multiple-platform suite of products being announced at the TechCrunch50 event will support the service.

In addition to instant messaging, AIM Lifestream will display updates from the social feeds mentioned above and, likewise, enable people to post back to the services. The suite of products, including mobile clients, Mac and Windows desktop apps, and a Web client, will launch on September 22. The current Lifestream Web site shows the development of the project so far. The finished version will bring instant messages into the mix.

The iPhone app for AIM Lifestream is available now, however, because the Apple approval process went much faster than AOL expected, said David Liu, AOL's senior vice president of global messaging. (You'll get AIM Lifestream when you download the paid AIM client for the iPhone.)

I tried the iPhone app. It's a decent combo client, although I found it much better for instant messaging than for Twitter or Facebook. While it is really nice to be able to get social network items and IMs in one client, you don't get the full visibility and control over your social accounts as you do in a full-featured client like the iPhone app Tweetdeck for Twitter, or Facebook's own app for Facebook. But if you're not a heavy user of the other services, the AIM Lifestream client is certainly servicable, and it's nice to be able to update your AIM status and other sites with just one message.

I've got Twitter and Facebook in my iPhone AIM client.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Liu said that the mobile clients are key to the AIM strategy and that geolocation features will be rolling out. Already, the iPhone client will report your location (if you let it) to your friends. In the future, Liu told me, you'll be able to see what your friends have said about places near you. Another big part of the Lifestream strategy is AIM's e-mail service. You'll be able to use your new AOL e-mail to read and reply to all the same messages you get in your AIM clients.

Finally, AIM won't be the only IM platform supported. ICQ support is coming soon. Also coming, I was told, is support for other IM networks. Liu wouldn't say which but claimed that AOL is "having discussions" with the big platforms. That would include Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as Facebook. The Google IM system is is open. Skype support would be a neat trick; I don't expect it.

AIM Lifestream will end up being a powerful social client due to the sheer number of AIM users who will upgrade from the older version of AIM. And while it's a great product for AIM power users, I don't think it's a good option yet for people whose online social lives revolve around other networks. In my case, for example, I'll continue to spend time in Twitter-centric clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop, because that's where my people are. And there's no way AIM is going to pry my wife away from the full Facebook experience.

Even so, AIM Lifestream is a good direction for AOL and I am looking forward to see how this new strategy evolves.

Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members' profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter's "@-replies."

This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they've been tagged. It's currently rolling out to members' profiles.

Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.

The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word "BREAKING" in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it's yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter's territory in its attempt to own the Web's trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it's enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.

As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook's failed attempt to buy Twitter, the "real-time stream" upgrades to the social network's home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.

On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook's fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn't yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged--for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot--and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who's talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.

It'd also be a formidable rival to the "analytics dashboard" that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company's first concrete revenue model.

The new 0.30 version of TweetDeck, due out Wednesday, supports MySpace. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's my demographic. But who the heck cares about MySpace?

The MySpace addition to TweetDeck, though, shows how much CEO Iain Dodsworth wants TweetDeck to become, in his words, "a browser for the real-time Web."

I like TweetDeck a lot. I use it and Seesmic Desktop in equal proportions. But I'm not sure I want my Twitter client to get all fancy and over-ambitious. Twitter is hard enough to manage even with a good, clean client. If TweetDeck adds support for other real-time feeds--Dodsworth mentions Last.fm, Songkick, and Doppler, for example--then I worry about the clarity of TweetDeck's Twitter experience getting murky.

Although there are some integrations that can work. I welcome TweetDeck 0.30's improved Facebook support. It now supports photo streams and makes it easy to update Facebook directly from Twitter, among other features. While Twitter and Facebook have different feature sets that make mixing the two networks in one application a little weird, in TweetDeck they run in separate columns and stay nice and separate. (Seesmic Desktop can merge streams from Twitter and Facebook in a single column, quite successfully.)

TweetDeck 0.30 has MySpace support (not shown, because who cares?).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Other improvements in the new version of TweetDeck include even tighter Bitly integration, down to the app's automatic and instant conversion of long links to short ones as you type them (cool) and the capability to drag photos directly into TweetDeck to post them to Facebook (also cool). You can also click on a hashtag in a tweet to kick off a new search column for that tag.

TweetDeck also gets a new list of recommended Twitter accounts for users to follow, and the way you add users is particularly elegant: you can add a whole collection of Twitterers in a topic, like "Journalists," and TweetDeck creates a new column in the interface to follow just those accounts. Unfortunately the process for getting accounts on to the TweetDeck recommended lists is opaque or "editorial" at the moment, although Dodsworth does say he'll move to a crowd-sourced model shortly.

The new version's user interface appears to be cleaned up. However, it's really that some options are now hidden in second-level menus.

And still missing is an option to get a notification sound only on @replies or direct messages. Sometimes I run Seesmic Desktop just for that one feature.

In sum, version 0.30 is a decent upgrade to TweetDeck, although the app is approaching feature overload with its continuing addition of new services.

Previously: New versions of Tweetdeck, Seesmic square off