14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter owes much of its popularity to the ecosystem of third-party apps and services that has sprung up around it. In fact, a big chunk of Twitter's userbase doesn't visit the site itself, but connects to the service via third-party desktop or mobile clients. On the desktop front, two players are battling it out for the title and, interestingly, both clients are built on top of the Adobe AIR platform. Now, though, Seesmic wants to get ahead by launching a dedicated Windows client, which offers several advantages over the AIR version like drag and drop and the possibility for a plug-in platform.
“[W]e are extremely proud to announce that our most popular twitter client is now available as a feature-rich native application for Windows,” Seesmic announced on its blog. “Partnered with Microsoft, engineered for Windows and optimized for Windows 7, this preview version of Seesmic for Windows combines the best features from of our ever-popular social application and provides it to you in a native Windows environment.”
Seesmic already builds a very popular client and the fact that it used AIR to do it didn't seem to hinder its growth so far. Add to this the fact that the app works on Windows, Mac and Linux without having to write separate code for each platform and there doesn't seem to be much incentive to switch. Apparently, though, some users had been complaining about the app being a resource hog, a trait shared with all AIR applications, and the platform also had some limitations in terms of functionality.
So the company is now launching a dedicated Windows client, which offers much of the same features as the one built on AIR. Twitter support is pretty much on par with the biggest features such as lists and multiple accounts being accounted for. Facebook is out of the picture for now, but it will be added in a few weeks. Considering that the client is still in a semi-private beta, this isn't much of a problem for now.
The Windows client is built with the .NET framework, making it significantly faster and more responsive, but also integrated with the native UI allowing for things like the pretty transparency effects on Windows 7. This approach also allows the app to take advantage of the location features available in Windows 7, something that is increasingly important, as Twitter is in the process of rolling out location-based functionality. Finally, it will also enable Seesmic to create a plug-in platform, hopefully attracting developers to add to the client's functionality, an approach that has done wonders for Twitter.
