This weekend has been a weekend of firsts, first camping trip of 2010, first time putting up a new tent, first time seeing a forest full of bluebells, first time using Seesmic’s new iPhone app. Much as I’d love to wax lyrical about bluebells and the wonderful Scottish countryside I think I’d be more useful telling you how I got on with Seesmic, although perhaps the title of the post may have given me away!
I’ve pretty much always used Tweetie as my Twitter app on my phone, sure I’ve tried out a few others like Echofon and Tweetdeck but I’ve always come back very swiftly to Tweetie. Of course Atebits was recently bought by Twitter and Tweetie became Twitter for iPhone, more of a mouthful but still the same reliable app which, as soon as I’d figured out how to switch off the annoying casino thing at the top, continued to be my app of choice.
When I saw that Seesmic had a new iPhone Twitter app I was curious but didn’t for a minute expect to like it. I read various glowing reports in the blogisphere but as I know there are a lot of Seesmic fans out there I didn’t think too much of it. Anyway I thought I might as well give it a bash and see how I got on.
Initially I have to say I really liked the premise behind the app – that you an have numerous different “spaces” that allow you to manage various Twitter accounts at once as well as lists, trending topics, searches or Facebook accounts. You then page between the various timelines by swiping the screen left or right. One of the main benefits I found is that you can update to one or more accounts at the same time by selecting which you want from a list, similar to Tweetdeck but sorely lacking in Twitter for iPhone.
So far so good and this in itself might be enough to entice me away from my favourite app. I played about with the app over the weekend and discovered that when out in the middle of the country and nowhere near 3G Seesmic loaded up far better than Twitter for iPhone, probably because it loads less Tweets in one refresh.
I got home and decided that I wouldn’t delete Seesmic as it was handy on a weak signal but that I’d stick with my current app partly because of my love for saving tweets to read later on Instapaper which is integrated into Twitter for iPhone and not available on Seesmic’s app.
While this is not a bad review of Seesmic you may think it hardly merits my world rocking title and you’d be right…..until that is I had a play with Ping.fm which is supported by the Seesmic app and can be added as a space.
Ping.fm, for the uninitiated, as a free service that allows your to send updates to loads of different social networks from one place. Normally I hate these apps and I really try not to send the same updates to lots of networks as each network I use is aimed at a slightly different audience and I believe in treating them separately and giving updates relevant to my audience. However, and this is super cool for anyone like me who runs a Facebook page, you can link your Facebook account to Ping.fm then link up any pages you’re admin of. Then, when you go into your Ping.fm space on your Seesmic app you can send updates to your Facebook page. This may be a small thing for some but for me this rocks my world! No other Twitter client I use allows me to send updates to my Facebook pages.
For this alone I love Seesmic and am their newest convert, add in the ability to retweet something I see in my timeline with another one of my accounts without even leaving my own timeline and I’m super happy. But, and this is the killer for Twitter for iPhone, the integration of Seesmic and Evernote….yes you read it right, in a tweet you can click on the share button, bottom right, and you have the ability to “send to Evernote” which opens your Evernote app (you’ve all got one right?) and automatically creates a new note, tagging it with relevant tags so that you can search it later with Evernote’s amazing search capacity. These three brilliant functions are why I will be evangelising for Seesmic and saying so long, farewell, aufweidersen, goodbye to Twitter for iPhone.
If you have an iPhone visit the App Store and download Seesmic – it’s free and its brilliant. If you have Facebook pages get a Ping.fm account and link it. If you don’t have Evernote what are you thinking, go get it, you’ll never look back.
There you go, sorted, job done, world rocked!
NB this post is iPhone-centric because I use one but the lovely peops at Seesmic also have an app for Android and Blackberry which I expect are every bit as good!
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Couldn’t agree more, Itchy! 😉 Love Evernote, LOVE Instapaper, and I’ve been giving Seesmic a try because it was recommended by the former. One gripe is that is shuts the app down in order to open up Evernote (just as easy to email from within the app to your evernote account?). But I agree, it’s so much quicker and reliable than the annoyingly re-labelled Twitter for iPhone…Not least annoying because I paid for it when it was Tweetie2 and now it’s free!
I wrote a similar post about my fave apps here: http://wp.me/pWzQM-j
Nice post, Rob
Thanks for the taking the time to read and comment Rob. I probably should have mentioned that if you do get annoyed by the shutting of the app (which although its nice to be able to choose which notebook I’m sending it to in the open evernote app is getting a wee bit annoying) you can always add @myen to a tweet and retweet or D myen and it will go to your evernote as long as you’ve linked your evernote and twitter account. You can do this through evernote online. Of course this works from any twitter client! Evernote is soooo clever!