Despite Twitter's phenomenal growth over the last few years, many see the microblogging network as odd, for geeks, or difficult to fully embrace, as it can be hard to find relevant content or a challenge to find people to follow or engage with. Seesmic, which has been making headlines on a regular basis over the last few months as Loic LeMeur's company has launched an array of clients for different devices, and even purchased Ping.fm for multi-network broadcasting, has now partnered with Microsoft and the Windows 7 team in Redmond to deliver a new product which brings engaging Twitter content to the desktop, without requiring users to even log in to view content.
The new tool, called Seesmic Look, hopes to make browsing Twitter as easy as selecting channels on a television. Look organizes people and brands, led by many celebrities' accounts, and centralizes an area for brands to communicate to potential customers, much like Facebook Fan Pages today. The product is a Windows desktop application, prepopulated with top users' accounts, by category.
Ellen DeGeneres In Seesmic Look
Instead of presenting the individual's updates on a monchromatic background, ordered from most recent to oldest, as has become the standard in Twitter clients for both the Web and desktop, Look displays the content in floating box windows atop artistically designed pages, featuring artsy Hollywood names for some celebrities and bold logos for participating brands.
Time's Channel on Seesmic Look
Like more traditional Twitter clients, Seesmic Look lets users track words or phrases through the application's search functionality. But as with the dedicated channel pages, the search results are also played back in a more visually entertaining array, more in common with a computer screensaver than flat search results common on practically every other solution.
If users do opt to login to Seesmic Look, it comes as no surprise that one can manage online mentions, direct messages and updates from within the application. Once logged in, you can make replies, favorite updates, view user profiles, post photos and shorten links, just as you can with other clients, but leveraging the unique application's interface.
Searching Twitter in Seesmic Look
Browsing Twitter Lists In Seesmic Look
For longtime Twitter veterans, Look won't add dramatically new functionality that would have them deleting their Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck or Tweetie, even if you prefer native Windows clients. But for the more casual users who have heard of Twitter and didn't have a great idea as to how they should get started, Look should get them to do just that.
After a slow start in the innovation side that had many wondering when Seesmic was going to stop parroting TweetDeck and following the company's lead, it is clear they have achieved momentum and are looking to find new ways to bring the realtime Web discussions out of the edge and into the norm. Teaming up with Microsoft's Windows 7 team looks to have been a fortuitous relationship that is helping the company deliver a unique interface and new approach to consuming data from the real-time firehose.
At the turn of the new year, I mentioned my current state of thinking around 2010 computing, saying the trends were toward getting lighter, faster, mobile and connected. While many are shaking in anticipation of Apple's announcements next week, spurred even further tonight with news from the Wall Street Journal about Apple's embracing a cloud-powered iTunes, I took a major move myself this week to practice what I project, aiming to live a much more cloud-connected life. The tool? A new (to me) MacBook Air, purchased from the Apple Store online, refurbished, saving me more than a few bucks.
While the Air is not brand new, it's a big step forward beyond the 2007 era MacBook Pro I've held onto the last two years-plus. Despite that machine's slightly-faster CPU power and larger hard drive, contrasted to the Air, its sluggishness grew too much to bear, bogging down from applications and mysterious bugs as time went by. It came to the point I could barely use apps like Microsoft Office without completely stalling. So I'm trying a new experiment, one that gets very close to this promised cloud future that is coming.
First, I am keeping the "old" laptop at home as the home "media" machine. That laptop will stick around and be the computer where I use Photoshop, my 60+ gigabytes of iTunes and our family's photos and videos. (And yes, it's all backed up)
Second, I am going to do the best I can to keep the Air light on applications, with the clear exception being Microsoft Office, out of necessity, not out of love.
When I set up the Air, I did not move over all my music, or my photos or my videos. The Air's 128 GB hard drive, even if it is a fast solid state drive, didn't need to be chewed up with 90 gigabytes of media. And I left more than 90 percent of my applications and utilities on the old machine, including Adobe's extremely demanding family of CS applications, from Photoshop and Illustrator to Reader. If I can help it, I will stay in the browser as much as possible, visiting Office on occasion, and maybe, if I want to, firing up Tweetie, should I grow tired of Web clients.
The goal is to choose Webmail over desktop mail, Spotify over iTunes, and for the most part, live in Safari and Chrome whenever possible.
This is not a full move to the cloud. I am not yet ditching Office for Google Apps (yet), and I still need to find a place to hold all that rich media in the cloud, if I am to do this for real, but it's close, and I am going to make a concerted effort to do as much as I can online rather than off. It's good for the computer, and it's good for me.
BusinessWeek has an interesting article that is being passed around the Web tonight talking about potential discussions between Apple and Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, replacing Google. The reason for this, the article speculates, is the increased competition between Cupertino and Mountain View, with the advent of the Android platform and Chrome OS. The article goes on to quote an unnamed source as saying that "Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy", leading to the conclusion that working with Microsoft would be more advantageous for Apple than sticking with Google.
So what is this about? The enemy of my enemy is my friend?
I have talked at length previously about the capability of Google to take on Apple on many fronts, highlighted most directly in my "Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?" post last October, looking at the two companies offering competing products at the OS layer, the browser layer, the mobile platform, and many other applications. That the two firms are increasingly overlapping is clear.
But primary enemies? Really? I am not yet sure.
The 1980s saw Apple's primary enemy as Big Blue. IBM and its IBM PC was seen as this monolithic figure that needed to be combatted, made famous with Apple's 1984 ad which introduced the Macintosh. By the 1990s, having been relegated to a minority market share, smacked down repeatedly from Redmond, Apple was going up against Microsoft, which was mocked as "The Evil Empire" and attacked around the world as a monopoly. At times, Apple and Dell were seen as rivals. In the 2000s, Microsoft itself focused on different mortal enemies, from Netscape and AOL to Google, with Apple being a mere thorn in its side.
Jobs' Deal With Microsoft in 1997
Google's rise in the 2000s saw not Apple as a major enemy, but more accurately, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Google eventually grew to the point that it was half-heartedly rooting for Yahoo! to play a larger role on the Web, to reduce anti-competitive discussions, and Microsoft's enterprise dominance has been the clear target for the company's push of Google Apps, and growing Office suite.
In the decade, for the most part, Google and Apple remained friends - with Eric Schmidt's role on Apple's board for the majority of the decade being the most obvious example. Apple made the right decisions through the decade to include Google when it made the most sense, integrating Google search into Safari, and Google Maps on the iPhone.
Even with the increased competition, Google never flipped the switch that Microsoft once did, turning "evil". Whether it's assumed Apple and Google are best friends at this point is not as important as the two companies making the right choices for consumers.
Going back to the BusinessWeek article, the main focus is that Apple is looking to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, which would reduce, only mildly, some exposure to Google Search, and would help Microsoft more as their improving search engine is in the hands of iPhone fans everywhere. But this could be a humungous case of sour grapes, poised to no doubt leave a bad taste in our mouths. And we've seen it play out before.
In 1997, Steve Jobs, returning to the CEO position at Apple after his jettison the decade before, struck a deal with Microsoft and his arch-rival Bill Gates, to have Microsoft invest $150 million in the floundering Apple and, ridiculously, make Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac. He even went so far as to say it was the best out there, dissing Netscape Navigator. It was a huge volley in Microsoft's battle to crush Navigator, and it reeked of backroom shenanigans that defied reality.
In 2010, moving to Bing would be perceived in the same light. While Bing has its fans, and I know some great people who work on the engine, the assumption from users is that Google is the gold standard in search. If Apple sells its customers short in what is perceived as a second class product, it erodes the customers' trust, and perception of quality from what's supposed to be a premium mobile experience. Even if Bing is twice as good as Google, no handful of on-stage demos from Steve Jobs and his team is going to make people think there's more to the story than Apple playing favorites.
From my view, Google is as concerned with Facebook and Microsoft as it is with Apple. If Apple is going after Google with Bing as a revenge play, then we customers are pawns being forced to accept embedding of products we didn't request. That very thing is what was at the heart of the DOJ's case against Microsoft in the late 1990s, and has me feeling less inclined to trust Apple, not more so.
Apple has gained a loyal customer base through focusing on best of breed, even if it costs a little bit more. From Apple, I should be able to assume a higher quality product, and something that reflects real worth. Bing is good, the very best Microsoft has ever offered in search, but backroom shenanigans dealt out due to hurt feelings or assumed alliances is wrong, no matter what. I don't think Apple and Google are going after each other's throats right now, and if so, Google is thinking about Apple less than Apple is thinking of them, so making a move because of enemies' rank is just ridiculous. It's not 1997 any more, and I have alternatives.
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