Just few hours after Seesmic launched its Seesmic desktop application, the authors of TweetDeck made a new beta version. Is it just us, or does this remind us of the Radeon HD4890 and paper-lanch of the GeForce GTX 275? Regardless of the similarities with the world of consumer graphics cards or microprocessors, this unscheduled move will undoubtedly heat up the competition between various social networking desktop applications.
TweetDeck claimed that they fixed the problem with memory leakage - but not completely. How lovely to have corporate talk messing up the brutal honesty of social networking. Anyways, TweetDeckers claim that they are working with Adobe to fix this AIR-related problem, so the users will be able to keep it on 24/7. This version fixed many problems and bugs and there are some new features like Digg URL shortening service, support for Spotify URLs, thumbnails of TwitPic images inside the desktop app. Neat feature is also preview of information about short URLs within the application - before opening the link.
Why do we feel desktop apps for twitter and other social networks will slowly, but certainly turn into bloatware like PUSH services in late 1990s?
Integrating Facebook will cheer up a lot of Facebook/Twitter users, since now they can follow the status updates from their friends on Facebook as well. You can also see when your friends on Facebook are on line, and even chat with them by clicking on their name.
Interesting feature is the ability to record and share short videos directly from TweetDeck, thanks to a tie-up with 12seconds.
Of course you can send feedback through UserVoice. Is this too little, too late to keep the users not to migrate to Seesmic desktop, or perfect strategic move, the time will show.
