Seesmic, Twitter and the iPhone have all been around for a couple of years, but for whatever reason it took a while for French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur‘s latest venture to come out with a proper iPhone / iPod touch application.
As of this morning, it’s here, and it’s … great.
The application, which you can download from iTunes via this link, lets users manage their Twitter and Facebook accounts and update other social networks through Ping.fm integration (Seesmic acquired the company behind that service earlier this year).
I’ll let you read the blog post and watch the video embedded below for more details about the Seesmic for iPhone app, but I think people will be interested to see how it stacks up against Twitter for iPhone (which was also released this week and is the latest iteration of Atebits’ Tweetie app) and TweetDeck.
The short version: if you’re a fan of the latter clients, there’s a good chance you will not be compelled to make the switch. If you’re not and you find yourself constantly wondering which is the best between those two, Seesmic for iPhone is simply a really great third alternative.
And if you haven’t tried any of them, I’d recommend you start out with Seesmic.
Seesmic for iPhone is free, fast, smooth, and complete. The built-in Twitter client is well-designed and has all the functionality you’ve come to expect (timeline, replies, direct messages, geolocation support for new tweets, the ability to add photos, retweets, multiple accounts support, search, trending topics, lists, favorites, URL shortening and so on). But so do TweetDeck and Twitter for iPhone, of course.
But Twitter for iPhone only supports the ‘new’ type of retweeting, and doesn’t give you an easy shortcut for old-school retweeting, aka ‘quoting’ (you can, but it’s cumbersome). And Twitter for iPhone obviously doesn’t have built-in support for Facebook. TweetDeck does, but neither support the many other social networks users can easily update with Seesmic for iPhone (again, thanks to Ping.fm integration).
Granted, you can use dedicated apps for Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., but for basic usage it’s simply a huge time-saver to be able to do all that from a single app.
Seesmic for iPhone also lets you save important messages and updates by storing them to Evernote in one tap, which is a very nice added bonus.
All this basically means Seesmic for iPhone is a worthy competitor to all the other apps when it comes to managing and updating your Twitter account, but definitely outshines both in terms of support for multiple social networking and other services – which makes Seesmic for iPhone stand on its own two feet as a very potent social hub rather than a mere ‘Twitter client’.
Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
