Seesmic Desktop is a new application that displays your Twitter and Facebook streams. It uses Adobe Air and runs on both PC and Mac.

Seesmic Desktop has many great features. Firstly, the ability to add multiple Twitter accounts (you can only add one Facebook account at this stage). Rather than having to swap between accounts to track your Twitter streams, it logs into all your accounts at startup and displays all the Tweets in one list (the Home window). A greatly requested feature is the ability to split off each account into it’s own window pane (or column). The Tweet and Facebook streams are then displayed in this new pane for the chosen account. This functionality alone really helps to separate Seesmic Desktop from all the other Twitter apps out there. Each account pane has the options at the bottom to show incoming Tweets, replies, direct messages, your own updates, and to use the Lookup feature of Twitter.

One other great feature is the ability to sort the people you are following into groups. By choosing the Userlist option, you can create a list and then start adding users. For example, you create a list called “Celebrities”. Inside this list you add Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. When you click on the Celebrities list, a new window pane is created with all the Tweets from all the users in that list displayed. This really helps you to segregate the stuff you find important from the not so important.

There is a link between Seesmic Desktop and Twitpic. By clicking on the Share Image button, you can drag and drop an image into the Share Image dialog and then Seesmic Desktop will post it to Twitpic automatically for you. Also mentioned is that video sharing will also be implemented in the coming versions.

You can, of course, post Tweets to Twitter and update your Facebook status as well. You can select from which account the message is to come from, enter your message and even shorten URLs by using either bit.ly, digg.com, is.gd, snurl.com, tr.im or twurl.nl.

The layout of Seesmic Desktop is extremely clean and intuitive. On the left hand side you have the standard Twitter navigation options (Home, Reply, Private, Sent). Below these are the Accounts, Userlists and Search options. When a search is performed, the keyword or phrase is stored under this option for future use.

As this is only a Preview release at this stage, there are still many features not yet implemented. Some of the features to come are:

• Block a user
• Spellcheck
• View Followers/Following
• Add services other than twitter (friendfeed, seesmic video, ideni.ca, laconi.ca)
• Read/Unread indicator

This video gives you a good overview of Seesmic Desktop.

Seesmic Desktop looks like it has alot of potential to become the king of the Twitter App heap. I’m looking forward to seeing the enhancements over the next few weeks.

For more information: Seesmic Desktop

About 4 weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and see what Twitter was all about. I knew beforehand that it was a short messaging system where people basically write what they are currently doing. It felt very reminiscent of Facebooks’ “What’s on your mind?”. However, I never thought it of much value. Boy, was I wrong!

After creating my account, I started searching for people I would like to follow. I not only found people, but also businesses sending out their messages to the world. Having just started a home exchange for golfers business with my wife, I decided to create a Twitter account. As our business is golf related, I didn’t have much trouble finding other people interested in golf and so began to follow them. This proved to be a tedious chore as I had to click over and over again to select the “follow” option for each person.

By sheer chance, a person I was following sent out a Tweet with a link purporting to help you increase your followers. As this was exactly what I wanted to do to try and increase traffic to our website, I decided to follow the link.

Upon reading through the linked blog, it became clear that “the secret to getting more followers in Twitter” was actually a program called Hummingbird – The Automatic Twitter Follower. What Hummingbird does is automate the following/unfollowing process. Here is how it works:

1. Add your Twitter account details in Hummingbird and select an account from the Twitter Accounts dropdown menu. Hummingbird will auto login for you
2. Do a search for a keyword related to the people you would like to follow (“golf” in our instance)
3. Choose a person/entity with a large number of followers and click on their followers list
4. Select Follow All from the Hummingbird menu and away it goes.

The principle behind all this is simple. When you are followed by someone, the Twitter Ettiquette demands that you then follow that person back. Of course, not everyone adheres to this Ettiquette. So, if you follow 1000 people, normally you should get anywhere from 200 to 400 people following back. So by following as many people as possible who you think would be interested in your Business theme, you then get a large portion of them following you back. As a result, whenever you tweet a link, it will be seen by thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Even if only a few percent click on your link, you are guaranteed of getting hundreds of hits.

As you get more and more followers, you will notice an increase in traffic to your site. We noticed quite an increase in traffic to our site after we started increasing our followers.

Now to stop what Twitter terms “aggressive following”, which is basically you following thousands of Twitter accounts in one go, there is a limit to how many followings you can have. This limit is based on the number of people following you. The higher the number of followers you have, the more people you can follow. This is where Hummingbird comes to the rescue.

Every couple of days, once the number of followers has slowed down, you need to unfollow people who haven’t followed you back. This will decrease your following number, allowing you to follow a fresh batch of Twitter accounts. All you have to do is.

1. Click on the “Following” link on your Twitter account Home page
2. Select Unfollow All

Hummingbird will automatically start going through the list of accounts you are following and unfollow those who haven’t followed you back. Hummingbird will even remember those accounts you unfollow so you won’t accidently follow them again in the future. Once this task is completed, search again using your keyword, select an account with a large amount of followers and set Hummingbird going. Rinse and repeat. It’s as simple as that.

One other great feature of Hummingbird is the ability to stop people you are following from being unfollowed. For example, you may be interested on following Ashton Kutcher, but with now over 1,000,000 accounts following him, it’s a slim chance that he will follow you back. To stop Hummingbird from removing an account automatically from your “followings” list, you can add it to your Hummingbird VIP list.

Hummingbird is a great little application. It’s a simple idea but really takes the slog work out of building up your followers. For any of you reading this who want to help kick start their business and get their message out their, or for those already on Twitter and having problems getting followers, I highly recommend you check Hummingbird out.

For more information on Hummingbird – The Automatic Twitter Follower: www.twitaddict.com

For those wanting to follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ghexchange

With this site, I hope to cover things such as Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook etc), Open Source Applications, Flash (AS3/4), PHP, mySQL, Javascript APIs and some entertaining links along the way.

I welcome any discussion on the subjects I write about, and hope I can help some of you reach solutions without spending hours “Googling” for the answer.