14 DAY TRIAL // There's no shortage of Twitter desktop clients but two stand out of the crowd and are engaged in a heated battle that so far hasn't produced any clear winner as neither TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop can have an exclusive feature for too long as the other quickly catches up. Now, Seesmic is taking the battle to the web with the launch of a web-based Twitter client but also outing an updated desktop client.
The web client is just the “Preview” version and clearly doesn't match the desktop version but it comes with some nice interface features mainly aimed at the Twitter power user. It only supports Twitter for now and one account. But some of the best features of the desktop client have been ported, like the multi column view allowing you to see the timeline, replies, direct messages and sent tweets at the same time or any combination of the four.
Also very useful is the compacted view, which makes it look very similar to an email client, like Gmail, and should make it easier to get through a large number of tweets quickly. Replying to a tweet is dead simple - just click on the reply button and the message box shows up inside the initial tweet, again making the conversations much like in an email client. Direct messages are just as easy to send and also viewing the user's profile as it pops out in a panel on the right.
Still, this is just an early version and a lot more functionality is coming, very soon if we judge by the speed at which the desktop client is being developed. One of the most urgent will be syncing the web client to the desktop one and the first steps have already been taken in that direction by allowing users to create a Seesmic account from the web app.
Also today, Seesmic Desktop is getting an update, reaching 0.4. The most notable is the ability to switch from single column mode to multi column mode and you can now collapse the sidebar if you want to maximize the screen space. Some internal changes have also been made, improving the overall performance.