Trumblog

Back in January Seesmic, the Twitter client developer, bought Ping.fm, the service for simultaneously updating multiple social networks.  At the time they boldly promised a BlackBerry application that merged the two services by the end of the month, but version 1.2.19, that was released at the end of January, had no Ping.fm functionality at all.  This week Seesmic rolled out release 1.3.28 and my dream of total social network access from one app has been realized.

Adding your Ping.fm account to Seesmic is simple and done through the menu options Accounts > Add account… from there you select “Add a Ping.fm account,” enter your email address and password and your Ping.fm account, with access to all of the 50+ social networks that it supports, is set up.  Your Ping.fm account is treated like any of your accounts on the application and when you want to post an update it appears as one of the account tabs that you can select.  You can post to one account (Twitter or Ping.fm), a Twitter and a Ping.fm account, multiple Twitter accounts, and even multiple Twitter accounts and Ping.fm. Multiple Ping.fm accounts are not allowed, but if they were I bet you could post to all of them at the same time too. Posting is very reliable and easy, but I’ve had issues using the Ping.fm @ short codes (such as @li to post just to LinkedIn) to send an update to individual or sets of social media accounts.

When I reviewed the previous version of the Seesmic application I compared it to ÜberTwitter and while it held its own it did not unseat ÜberTwitter as my favorite Twitter client for the BlackBerry.  I’ve updated that chart comparing the latest versions of Seesmic and ÜberTwitter below.

Seesmic – ÜberTwitter Comparison 2

As you can see from the chart above the latest version of Seesmic maintains the same feature set and stands up to ÜberTwitter similarly to how the last release did. Primary Twitter functionality is all there on Seesmic and works well. I even think that pictures load a little faster on Seesmic than on ÜberTwitter. But ÜberTwitter has people search, tweets near you, tweet deletion, profile editing, trending topics, alerts and other small enhancements that Seesmic doesn’t. The only feature like this that Seesmic has is the ability to save searches.

But then there is Ping.fm and its integration with Seesmic. That addition is huge. With the addition of Ping.fm to the Seesmic app goes from an also ran to a product with a significant differentiator. The issue becomes do I (or will I now) update my social networks enough to be worth the trade for losing features like Tweets Near You, Find a Person and a nicer look and feel? Time will tell.

For now the novelty of Seesmic and its ability to post to multiple social networks has made it my go to Twitter app on the Blackberry. But I find myself drifting back to ÜberTwitter now and again for some of those missing features and realizing how important some features that I took for granted are. I can’t say anymore that ÜberTwitter is my favorite BlackBerry Twitter app, but I also can’t say that Seesmic is. Seesmic is in a great position, will need to keep evolving to take the lead. And only time will tell if the feature that I thought would be a game changer turns out to be little more than a novelty.

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