Today brings good news for PC users everywhere. Seesmic is launching a native desktop client for Windows. Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur made the announcement today at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Le Meur says that providing a desktop client that was native for Windows was of huge importance because 80 percent of Seesmic users run their apps on a PC.
There are a few native Twitter clients out there to have been formatted for the Mac, such as Tweetie and Twitterfic. Windows users have previously limited options when it comes to native Twitter clients and are forced to either used web-based clients or use desktop clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. These are both based Adobe’s AIR platform, which is notorious for eating up memory and CPU cycles, along with weird window placement quirks.
Seesmic’s new desktop client will feature integration with just Twitter (Facebook will be added in the next few weeks) and will have much of the same functionality as the Adobe Air-powered client such as lists and multiple accounts, but it will be built on the .NET framework. This means the client will have a faster, better UI, lower memory consumption. Plus the client can take advantage of Windows7 modules such as location sensor, letting the user to post a location directly to Twitter.
The native Windows client will feature multi-language spell check, while the Air-powered Seesmic Desktop supports basic English. Another interesting feature of the client is a a plug-in architecture pretty much like on a browser, so Tweetmeme can write, for example, a plug-in that will give you how a tweet is spreading or the influence of a Twitter user. Because the Windows ecosystem, it will be much easier for developers to build plug-ins and add-ons off of the client. Le Meur says that building on Windows lets Seesmic offer this as a secure platform to developers, which is not possible or difficult on the Adobe Air or web-based platform.
There are other Twitter clients that have been developed for Windows, such as Sobees and Blu, but Seesmic will have the advantage of integration with Facebook and much more.
Seesmic has been in the news a lot lately thanks to the emergence of Twitter lists and geolocation. Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client and its web-based client was upgraded with both Lists functionality and geolocation.
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To be honest, I was surprised to hear that 80 percent of Seesmic users use a PC. I guess in the Apple-centric world of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that stat. Now, I’m eagerly waiting for Seesmic to unveil a native client for the Mac. Watch out Tweetie!
Disclaimer: Michael Arrington is an investor of Seesmic; I am not.
